The power associated to Big Tech, often equated to the ‘Big Five’ (Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft), is posing new problems at the societal and regulatory levels. Such problems lead to deeper questions in terms of power generation, use, and limitation, which a political philosophy perspective brings new flesh to. In this episode, we sit with Juho Lindman, whose award-winning paper "Big Tech’s power, political corporate social responsibility and regulation" interrogates questions in this range. Beyond regulation, he engages issues of political corporate responsibility and their relevance in the present international scenario.

Juho Lindman is Professor of Information Systems in the Department of Applied IT at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden) and the director of the University of Gothenburg Blockchain Lab. His current research focuses on open-source software development, blockchain governance, open data, and organisational change. His paper "Big Tech’s power, political corporate social responsibility and regulation", with Jukka Mäkinen and Eero Kasanen, won the Best Paper Prize by the Journal of Information Technology in 2024.

Resources:

Lindman, J., Makinen, J., & Kasanen, E. (2023). Big Tech’s power, political corporate social responsibility and regulation. Journal of Information Technology, 38(2), 144-159. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/02683962221113596.

The recent Olympic Games and European Football Championship have highlighted once again the importance, and controversiality, of technologies associated with referee decisions. A Video Assistant Referee, or VAR, is tasked with assisting the referee concerning dubious situations in a sports game. While VAR has become part and parcel of the experience of multiple sports, including football, little is known about the complex sociotechnical fabric that plays out every single time a VAR decision is made. Today we are joined by Stan Karanasios and Bikesh Raj Upreti, respectively Associate Professor and Lecturer in the Department of Business Information Systems at the University of Queensland, who look at “addressing equivocality with technology” by means of VAR. With them, we examine the history of some glaring errors of VAR in football and use that as an entry point to discuss VAR, its genesis, and the sociotechnical profile of a technology that the many sports fans among us witness frequently.

Stan Karanasios is an Associate Professor in the Department of Business Information Systems at the UQ Business School, University of Queensland. His research focuses on how digital technology impacts organisations and society, and he has published widely on domains including fintech, the digital transformation of enterprises, and the use of social media platforms in the emergency sector. He is a Senior Editor for Information Systems Journal, an Associate Editor for the European Journal of Information Systems, Section Editor for the Australian Journal on Information Systems, and on the Editorial Board for Mind, Culture & Activity and the International Journal of Information Management.

Bikesh Raj Upreti is a Lecturer in the Department of Business Information Systems at the UQ Business School, University of Queensland. He received his PhD from Aalto University, focusing on developing applications to uncover insights from large-scale text data. He researches applied computational methods and quantitative inquiry of inter-disciplinary phenomena, and has applied such analytical tools for large-scale behavioural and predictive analytics set in Information systems, marketing, finance and political discourses.

Resources:

Karanasios, S., Upreti, B., & Iannacci, F. (2023). When Is a Goal a Goal? Addressing Equivocality with Technology. European Conference of Information Systems (ECIS), Kristiansand, 13-16 June 2023, https://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2023_rip/10/.

The ongoing war on Gaza, one of the deadliest military assaults in history, has been accompanied by extreme applications of digital technologies to warfare. This feeds into the many layers of cybercontrol to which Palestine, a land under military and settler occupation, has long been subjected. Today we are joined by Fabio Cristiano to explore data violence in the ongoing Israeli assault, and the multiple implications it has in the space of human and digital rights.

Fabio Cristiano is Assistant Professor in Conflict Studies at Utrecht University. His research explores the making of international conflict in/through cyberspace, focusing primarily on questions related to automation and non-human agency (AI); violence; socio-technical knowledge production; sovereignty/territoriality; and digital rights. He is an Associate Fellow of The Hague Program on International Cybersecurity and the lead editor of Artificial Intelligence and International Conflict in Cyberspace (Routledge, 2023) and Hybridity, Conflict, and the Global Politics of Cybersecurity (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023).

Resources:

• Cristiano, F., & Distretti, E. (2021). Toward an Aesthetics by Algorithms—Palestinian Cyber and Digital Spaces at the Threshold of (In) visibility. The Aesthetics and Politics of the Online Self: A Savage Journey into the Heart of Digital Cultures, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-65497-9_10 .
• Cristiano, F. (2019). Deterritorializing cyber security and warfare in Palestine: Hackers, sovereignty, and the National Cyberspace as normative. CyberOrient, https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/j.cyo2.20191301.0002.
• Cristiano, F. (2019). Internet access as human right: a dystopian critique from the occupied Palestinian territory. Springer International Publishing, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-91770-2_12 .

The foundational elements of EU migration policies and security technologies started to take a turn in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, accelerating the research and use of traditional military and war technologies such as drones in civilian border management. In this episode, we explore the role of drones in border studies, the evolving landscape of EU border technologies in the wake of AI, and how these security problems and solutions are co-produced in the frameworks of migration policies with Bruno Oliveira Martins.

Bruno is a senior researcher at Peach Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), where he is co-leader of the Security & Technology Research Group and a member of the PRIO Migration Centre. His research is centered on the intricate dynamics of security solutions and their implications for border management and those affected by it.

Resources:

Martins, Bruno Oliveira & Michael Strange (2019) Rethinking EU external migration policy: contestation and critique, Global Affairs 5 (3): 195–202.

Martins, Bruno Oliveira & Maria Gabrielsen Jumbert (2020) EU Border technologies and the co-production of security ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2020.1851470.

Health data governance should ensure protection for individuals' health data against violations, while enabling the smooth functioning of healthcare systems. Doing so involves a complex set of stakeholders, opening multiple questions which directly affect the way our health data are collected, stored and managed. Today we sit with Dragana Paparova to unpack such questions, learning about issues and practices at the heart of health data governance.

Dragana Paparova is a postdoctoral researcher in Information Systems at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo. Her research is centred on the production, sharing and usage of patient (generated) healthcare data across stakeholders and organisational boundaries. She holds a PhD from University of Agder, and her paper "Data Hierarchies: The Emergence of an Industrial Data Ecosystem", coauthored with Daniel S. Svendsrud, was runner-up for Best Student Paper Award at ICIS 2023.

Resources:

Paparova, D. (2024). Data spaces and the (trans) formations of data innovation and governance. Doctoral dissertations at University of Agder, https://uia.brage.unit.no/uia-xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/3112105/Dissertation.pdf?sequence=4

Paparova, D., Aanestad, M., Vassilakopoulou, P., & Bahus, M. K. (2023). Data governance spaces: the case of a national digital service for personal health data. Information and Organization, 33(1), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1471772723000052

Svendsrud, D. S., & Paparova, D. (2023). Data Hierarchies: The Emergence of an Industrial Data Ecosystem. International Conference of Information Systems (2023) Proceedings, https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2023/diginnoventren/diginnoventren/14.

The narrative of digital deception pervades the discourse on generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), opening important questions on the validity and verifiability of the information we come across daily. In this landscape, generative AI is now being extensively used to create engaging bots on social media which poses several threats to the fabric of trust and safety we as users expect over the internet. Today we sit with Sippo Rossi to unpack the nature of such problems, how we as users of social media can remain vigilant and its implications on future research on this topic.

Sippo Rossi is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen. He is soon to graduate with his PhD from the Department of Digitalization at the Copenhagen Business School, and during his studies, he contributed to research on bot detection on X, formerly Twitter, and the use of AI in research.

Resources:

Rossi, S., Rossi, M., Mukkamala, R. R., Thatcher, J. B., & Dwivedi, Y. K. (2024). Augmenting research methods with foundation models and generative AI. International Journal of Information Management, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0268401223001305.

Rossi, S., Kwon, Y., Auglend, O. H., Mukkamala, R. R., Rossi, M., & Thatcher, J. (2022). Are Deep Learning-Generated Social Media Profiles Indistinguishable from Real Profiles?., Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.07214.

Rossi, S., Rossi, M., Upreti, B. R., & Liu, Y. (2020). Detecting political bots on Twitter during the 2019 Finnish parliamentary election. In T. X. Bui (Ed.), Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS 2020 (pp. 2430-2439). http://hdl.handle.net/10125/64040

Humanitarian aid has undergone significant transformations in recent years, driven in part by the increasing integration of technology and the growing influence of private partners. Such a development not just changes who the actors are also, the mindset and response these actors bring for such an important ecosystem. We sit with Giulio Coppi to understand the principles of humanitarian aid, how digital technologies have been employed and the increasing influence of private players.

Giulio Coppi is a senior humanitarian officer at Access Now. Access Now is an organization that defends and extends the digital rights of people and communities at risk. Giulio has been an advocate for open and fair humanitarian technologies and is currently involved in a landscape mapping project to observe the emerging patterns increased private actors in the space.