Join us tomorrow from 9-10:00 AM in Library Room 242 for Cayuse Training! Register for the session to attend.
On Thursday, we’re collaborating with the Graduate Student Government and Ecosystem Science Center for a Research Proposal Writing Workshop, geared toward Graduate Students. Visit GSG’s website for more information about the event.
The third episode of IPEC’s monthly podcast is now streaming on Spotify and Apple Podcasts!
Our guest, Dr. Jason Archer, discusses his research in human machine communication and haptics. Jason is an Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Technologies here at Michigan Tech. Jason serves on the executive committee of IPEC and leads our Human Machine Culture research area. This research area focuses on the developing dynamics between humans and machines — the ways humans and communicative machines sense and make sense of the world together, and the cultural impacts of those formations.
Together, we talk about our next sense-revolution: touch. Listen now!
Dr. Jason Archer’s Guest Appearance on IPEC’s podcast streams tomorrow, November 7! In our third episode, host Kendall Belopavlovich and Jason discuss his research in human machine communication, haptics, and sensory studies. Check out our podcast page for more.
On Thursday, the Graduate Student Government will be facilitating a 3 Minute Thesis competition. The finals will be held from 6-8:00pm, November 9, at the Great Lakes Research Center.
Finally, Friday is set to see IPEC members Charles Wallace and Susanna Peters facilitate a Computer Science Colloquium from 3-4:00pm in Rekhi 214. This event is also available as a webinar. See the event page for more details!
This month, we’re featuring the work of one of the institute’s executive committee members, Dr. Jason Archer.
Jason is an Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Technologies, Director of Communication, Culture, and Media, and Human Machine Culture Research Area Lead for IPEC.
According to Jason, “I situate my research at the nexus of communication, media studies, science and technology studies (STS), and sensory studies, with emphasis on human-machine communication and haptics. I am currently working on projects related to human machine culture: robotic touch and sociality, surgical robotics and sociotechnical constructions of disability, and haptic holograms.”
During this year’s 41 North Film Festival, Jason will be hosting a panel with Steven Walton and Charles Wallace after the screening of the film Time Bomb Y2K on November 2, 7:00 pm.
We’re excited to delve into Jason’s research in this month’s episode of the IPEC Presents Podcast, streaming on Spotify and Apple Podcasts November 7, at 6:00 am.
The Human Machine Culture research area seeks diverse researchers interested in examining cultural debates about communicative machines (social robots, virtual agents, chatbots, and other AI entities), critiquing the culture of communicative machine development, investigating social practices arising from the integration of these machines into everyday life, and exploring the potential for novel artistic and expressive forms emerging through human machine configurations.
The research area aims to establish connections between researchers of diverse disciplines, in areas of humanities, arts, sciences, and engineering to address the complexity and consequences of Human Machine Culture.
To kick off a very busy month of programming, workshops, and research activity, we’re publishing our November newsletter early so that you can stay up to date with all of our upcoming events and opportunities!
With a new year (and semester) on the horizon, the Social Media and Society research area lead Rich Canevez has envisioned an exciting research agenda that you can be a part of! Applying to join the research area is easy, with our new google form.
Rich Canevez (research area lead) just conducted field research at the Toronto Ukraine Festival in September, collecting data and recruiting participants to share their thoughts on the use of religious iconography to support Ukraine’s resistance.
This project will continue throughout the year until the summer of 2024, and will include coordinated work across Ukrainian communities in St. Louis MO and Cleveland OH in the United States.
The penetration of social and digital media into almost every facet of social and political life has come with it the re-construction and re-imagining of those processes and practices. Peace and conflict, truth and fiction, and the material and discursive aspects of life find new practices and conceptions within these spaces. Although built within the cyber-spaces of the Internet, the impact of social and digital media information is equally about the physical lived realities of our world as it is about the digital lives we lead.
The Social Media and Society research area sets an inclusive lens on the impact that trans-national exchanges of information have on political, social, cultural, and personal life. The evolution of political life alongside the Internet has created not just novel modes of engagement of these processes, but also created new dimensions of conflict and war that challenge our previous conceptions of how these phenomena play out. The evolution of social and personal life alongside the Internet has provided new spaces for communities to construct meanings and world-views relevant to groups and the self, for better or for worse.
The types of projects we consider are how information and cyber-spaces interact with war and conflict, how disinformation and misinformation manifests and spreads through social media platforms, and more generally the range of emergent topics concerning the impact of trans-national information exchange on societies world-wide.
We will be continuing our current projects looking at cyber activism and resistance in the Ukrainian defense against Russian aggression, and exploring the discourses around COVID-19 disinformation while continuing to grow our research area and overall presence at Michigan Tech University.
It is our goal in 2024 to extend our reach even further throughout MTU’s departments and divisions given the broad and wide ranging contributions from different perspectives on campus that could help grow this area through collaborations across research, events, and pursuing funding opportunities.
We also are intending to more closely communicate the research support we can offer to both undergraduate and graduate students alike who could be interested in contributing to ongoing research efforts, or even starting their own. It is our hope that, in accomplishing these objectives, we can move towards establishing ourselves as a research and collaboration lab under the IPEC umbrella.
IPEC has five research areas
All of our research areas invite graduate students and faculty to join by filling out our new interest form. More information about each research area can be found on IPEC’s website.
The institute brings together a diversity of knowledge holders–faculty, postdoctoral scholars, graduate students, staff, and community members–to collaborate on and engage in research and scholarship that responds to the emerging techno-social environment.
The institute supports members through activities, such as, but not limited to, identifying funding opportunities, helping researchers develop externally funded research proposals, assisting in the creation and management of multiple investigator proposals and project teams, assisting with post-award project management and compliance, providing seed funding to support research development, supporting research activities with awards, and providing opportunities to promote collaboration internally and externally.
Join us for two events this week, co-sponsored by IPEC
Associate Professor Charles Wallace, Computer Science, will present a Computer Science Colloquium on Friday, October 13, 2023, at 3 pm in Rekhi 214 and via Zoom webinar. The title of the talk is, “The role of peer dialogue as disruptor in critical ethical analysis for computing students.”
The role of peer dialogue as disruptor in critical ethical analysis for computing students
The importance of dialogue in questioning assumptions and bringing new options and perspectives to light is well established in various areas of decision-making; what potential does it hold to enrich students’ critical thinking competencies in the context of ethics education? We examine student work in an ethics course for senior computer science and software engineering students. The course includes a series of exercises in critical ethical inquiry, implementing the iterative Ethical Cycle approach of van de Poel and Royakkers with reflection sessions where students exchange peer critiques. Through a qualitative analysis of two years of student work, we explore two questions: what kinds of critical issues do students acknowledge in peer dialogue, and how do students incorporate, or fail to incorporate, critical challenges into their work? We identify and categorize critical challenges that appear in student reflection statements, and we identify a number of patterns of critical engagement: ways in which student map the identifications of critical challenges to subsequent changes in later iterations.
Our results indicate that dialogue with others is generally an enriching component of students’ ethical inquiry, though not all students take advantage of it even when built into class exercises, and other students may adopt new ideas in a superficial way, failing to truly incorporate them into prior discussion. The results also suggest certain design changes of the ethical analysis exercises that can help students take greater advantage of insights from their peers: fostering greater interplay between peers through a single clearly identified topic; more defined scaffolding of peer discussions, prompting students to identify critical challenges from others; further scaffolding to remind students of the peer challenges raised earlier and ask them how (and whether) they wish to incorporate these new perspectives into their own work; and more discussion and modeling of how to truly incorporate new ideas in a robust way.