INTERDISCIPLINARy URBAN AI

DIS 2020 Workshop

CALL FOR PAPERS

URBAN AI

Formulating an Agenda for the Interdisciplinary Research of Artificial Intelligence in Cities

July 8–9, 2020 online

This workshop intends to form and gather a novel community of researchers around the topic of ‘urban AI’ to scrutinize the intersections of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies and cities – i.e. urban life, spaces, places, and infrastructures – from an interdisciplinary, design-oriented perspective. We call on researchers from various disciplines, including the design fields, the social sciences, and technology, to reflect with us on the question:

How can we formulate relevant, thoughtful, critical, participatory and democratic approaches to researching and developing urban AIs?

The workshop is held in conjuction with the The ACM Conference on Interactive Systems (DIS'20). You can find more information on the workshops on the DIS'20 workshops page.

Those interested are invited to submit a position paper (2–4 pages) in the SIGCHI Extended Abstracts format. These contributions may address, for example:


  • Theoretical considerations: e.g., utilising key theoretical concepts from various fields to analyse urban AIs and inform their design

  • Case studies: empirical works that explore the way AIs affect cities and urban lives

  • Design-based explorations: urban AI implementations in real-world settings

  • Methods: including the challenges and opportunities urban AI’s will present to methodologies such as participatory design, speculative design, citizen science, ethnography, research through design, etc.

  • Thematic issues: e.g. AI's as non-human agents in cities; ethical dilemmas of AI; aesthetics of AI and urban environments; data privacy and surveillance in cities; identifying use cases and users of urban AIs; consequences of AI’s on urban life and/or infrastructures; emerging geographies of AI; design thinking; wellbeing; user experience; sustainability and AI; etc.


Important dates

Deadline for position papers: 11 Jun 2020 Extended to 15 Jun 2020!

Notification to workshop participants: 18 Jun 2020

Workshop Duration: Two-day session

Position papers should be sent to: aale.luusua [at] oulu.fi and johanna.ylipulli [at] aalto.fi

Organizers

Dr. Aale Luusua is a post-doctoral researcher at the INTERACT Research Group at the University of Oulu, Finland. With a general research focus on urban environments, citizen participation, digitalization and design theory, Dr. Luusua currently leads the Academy of Finland postdoctoral project Experiencing Artificial Intelligence in the Smart City: Co-creating applications for urban life (AICity). Dr. Luusua’s works have been published in leading international scientific books and journals published by SAGE, Routledge and Springer, and in leading scientific conference proceedings, such as the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems and the ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems.

Dr. Johanna Ylipulli is a cultural anthropologist working as a postdoctoral researcher of the Information Networks programme at the Aalto University. Her research has focused on cultural and social implications of new digital technologies in urban contexts. Dr. Ylipulli has worked in exceptionally interdisciplinary research environments in leading Finnish Universities, and published broadly, in fora spanning from prominent social scientific journals to flagship conferences of human-computer interaction. These include International Communication Gazette, Technological Forecasting and Social Change and Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), and publishers such as Routledge and SAGE.

PROGRAM


Participants will get links to Zoom (zoom.us) and Miro (miro.com). See you at the workshop!


Wednesday 8 June, 2020

All times CEST (+1 EEST, -1 GMT, -9 PDT)


7:30-7:45 Optional technical check-in with Zoom and Miro

8:00 am Welcome and roll call

8:15 Session 1: Pre-prepared brief presentations / discussant comments

10:15 Briefing: Why “UrbanAI?”

10:30 Briefing: Interdisciplinarity in studying urban technology

10:45 Forming pairs

11:00– Session 2: Work in trios/pairs (Warm up: Reflections on personal and disciplinary background, discussing with group)

Live guidance available until 15:00

Thursday 9 June, 2020

All times CEST (+1 EEST, -1 GMT, -9 PDT)


8:00 am Welcome back! Reflections on yesterday + Brief on Urban Ai

9:00 Session 3: Group work (Charting and agenda through themes, methods and theories for Urban AI)

10:30 Break (when you find it convenient)

11:00 Group presentations

12:00 Session 4: Final roundtable and feedback, plans for the future

13:00 Closing the workshop