[Air-L] CFP: Streams of Consciousness: Data, Cognition and Intelligent Devices

[nathaniel tkacz]

STREAMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS: DATA, COGNITION AND INTELLIGENT DEVICES

21st and 22nd of April, 2016
Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies
The University of Warwick


Call for Presentations:

“What’s on your mind?” This is the question to which every Facebook status
update now responds. Millions of users sharing their thoughts in one giant
performance of what Clay Shirky once called “cognitive surplus”.
Contemporary media platforms aren’t simply a stage for this cognitive
performance. They are more like directors, staging scenes, tweaking
scripts, working to get the best or fully “optimized” performance. As
Katherine Hayles has pointed out, media theory has long taken for granted
that we think “through, with and alongside media”. Pen and paper, the
abacus, and modern calculators are obvious cases in point, but the list
quickly expands and with it longstanding conceptions of the Cartesian mind
dissolve away. Within the cognitive sciences, cognition is now routinely
described as embodied, extended, and distributed. They too recognize that
cognition takes place beyond the brain, in between people, between people
and things, and combinations thereof. The varieties of specifically human
thought, from decision-making to reasoning and interpretation, are now
considered one part of a broader cognitive spectrum shared with other
animals, systems, and intelligent devices.

Today, the technology we mostly think through, with and alongside are
computers. We routinely rely on intelligent devices for any number of
operations, but this is no straightforward “augmentation”. Our cognitive
capacities are equally instrumentalized, plugged into larger cognitive
operations from which we have little autonomy. Our cognitive weaknesses are
exploited and manipulated by techniques drawn from behavioural economics
and psychology. If Vannevar Bush once pondered how we would think in the
future, he received a partial response in Steve Krug’s best selling book on
web usability: *Don’t Make Me Think!* Streams of Consciousness aims to
explore cognition, broadly conceived, in an age of intelligent devices. We
aim to critically interrogate our contemporary infatuation with specific
cognitive qualities – such as “smartness” and “intelligence” – while
seeking to genuinely understand the specific forms of cognition that are
privileged in our current technological milieu. We are especially
interested in devices that mediate access to otherwise imperceptible forms
of data (too big, too fast), so it can be acted upon in routine or novel
ways.

Topics of the conference include but are not limited to:

- data and cognition

- decision-making technologies

- algorithms, AI and machine learning

- visualization, perception

- sense and sensation

- business intelligence and data exploration

- signal intelligence and drones

- smart and dumb things

- choice and decision architecture

- behavioural economics and design

- technologies of nudging

- interfaces

- bodies, data, and (wearable) devices

- optimization

- web and data analytics (including A/B and multivariate testing)

Confirmed Speakers: LOUISE AMOORE, JAMES ASH, DAVID BERRY, WILLIAM DAVIES,
MICHAEL DIETER, STEVE FULLER, JENNIFER GABRYS, ANTOINETTE ROUVROY, NATASHA
SCHÜLL, NICK SRNICEK, NIGEL THRIFT, MICHAEL WHEELER.

Please submit individual abstracts of no longer than 300 words. Panel
proposals are also welcome and should also be 300 words. Panel proposals
should also include indvidual abstracts. The deadline for submissions is
Friday the 18th of December and submissions should be made
tocimconf at warwick.ac.uk. Accepted submissions will be notified by 20th of
January 2016.

Streams of Consciousness is organised by Nathaniel Tkacz and Ana Gross. The
event is supported by the Economic and Social Research Council.


-----------------------
Nathaniel Tkacz  |  Associate Professor - CIM  - The University of Warwick
Tw: @__nate__  |  Current Research: Interrogating the Dashboard: Data,
Indicators and Decision-making
<http://blogs.cim.warwick.ac.uk/readingdashboards/>

Latest Book:
Wikipedia and The Politics of Openness
<http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/W/bo19085555.html>
(University
of Chicago Press, 2015)
Times Higher Education Book of The Week, 2015