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The Wild Spot – An interspecies well-being hotspot
Things are set in motion on a grey and windy February morning in Amsterdam, one of those that feel like a major force stole half of the colour palette of the world, and you are left there with a heavy sky pressing on your shoulders. The location is...
The Wild Spot: a community experiential learning project about nature and attention
The Wild Spot - which is now also a non-profit organisation - is home to my independent research on technology's role in society, which is...
The Kaunas manifesto for inclusive urban metaverses
The cycle of encounters "Inclusive Urban Metaverses" held in Kaunas (Lithuania) was the first ever occasion where the topic of the metaverse was...
The ID.me backlash: facial recognition and citizens’ options in the digital state
The last frontier of digital welfare dystopia is facial recognition. In an article on The Atlantic, Joey Boulamwini, founder of Algorithmic Justice...
Meta abuse: the metaverse problem with human dignity and safety
The metaverse developed by Meta has already been robbed of its age of innocence, if it ever had one. The virtual environment Horizon Worlds,...
How do you prepare the ground for an energy community?
Energy communities, which organise collective and citizen-driven energy actions, will have an exponential role in the shift to renewables. They...
Digital placemaking in Kaunas: extremely vast and incredibly close future
What would you do if you had an enormous space to fill in your city? The Extremely Vast and Incredibly Close Future workshop I organised on November...
Data Campfire: a methodology for data justice in urban regeneration
What do official data tell us about a place? How to make a place speak through its informal data? To find out, I have recently organised a Data...
For an ecology of attention: a walk along biodiversity and data centres at Amsterdam Science Park
How to integrate some sense of wonder in everyday routes? Where we direct attention plays an important role. Last week, I had the pleasure to...
NFTs problem with interoperability
Imagine. You are a proud avant-gardist who invested the amount of a flight to an exotic country (a good as luxurious as three villas, these days) in...
Sidewalk ontology: the dangerous equation of robots and pedestrians
Recently Pennsylvania passed a law that authorises delivery robots to circulate on sidewalks and classifies them as pedestrians. Autonomous robots...
What we know so far about the New European Bauhaus
On January 18 the European Commission launched a brand new initiative, the New European Bauhaus. With it, the EC taps into a key European...
Stop biometric mass surveillance: sign the Reclaim Your Face campaign
On January 7, the European Commission decided to register a European Citizens' Initiative (ECI) entitled 'Civil society initiative for a ban on...
Three prompts to navigate 2021
The year started with an in-real-life memes invasion of US Capitol, a brutal call to reality for the hopes that the calendar’s turn would be the...
How AI strategy is evolving (and why social justice should replace ethics)
It is okay to be disoriented by the number of publications and guidelines about AI ethics. Since 2016, they have been booming. The inventory of AI...
Shall sousveillance become a civil right of the digital age?
Europeans often look at the easiness with which American cops take lives (certain kind of lives, mostly) with superiority. Analysis of the US social...
Goodbye planning, welcome place-making
2020 ratified the end of linear planning. The idea of programming as a reassuring navigation exercise between signposts - a certain revenue...
The EU Data Governance Act
Three and a half years after the entry into force of the GDPR, the European Commission releases a new ambitious legal framework about data, the Data...
T-Factor: a new urban regeneration project to build a shared public value through “meanwhile spaces”
Temporary and ‘meanwhile spaces’ are on the rise across Europe. More and more vacant buildings, plots and unutilized spaces are serving as temporary...
Automating Society Report 2020
Journalists and experts from across Europe contributed to the new Algorithm Watch annual report Automating Society, covering automated decision...
The European blockchain for social good landscape
The European Science Hub released the most comprehensive report existing about the status of Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) for social and...
Exploring gender-responsive designs in digital welfare
The think tank Digital Future Society just released the second report of its series about gender and digital welfare. The first, that I authored,...
Towards an algorithmic right inspired by feminism
Last week I presented my work on the gender aspects of automating public services at the MA in Algorithmic Right and Data Governance of the...
All problems can be illuminated: on leadership and role models
Coinbase is a cryptocurrency exchange platform which mission statement is “to use cryptocurrency to bring economic freedom to people all over the...
Facebook wearables and the urge of ambient privacy
Facebook has a new research project, Aria. Under the pretext of leading the way to the next generation of AR and VR wearables, it brings the problem...
The case for a European data economy: panel at NGI Summit
On Monday, I had the pleasure to moderate the opening panel of the NGI Summit (full video here). It was a roundtable about the data economy with...
How Wikipedia pages influence the real-world
The other day I went down a rabbit hole about Wikipedia's real-world impact. The conversation was originally around women’s presence on Wikipedia...
A dictator is not a client: Sandvine in Belarus and the banality of evil
Business is business, but being remembered as the company which helped "the last dictator of Europe" is not the most desirable marketing material....
The Ofqual case: a precedent for protesting algorithms?
Hundreds of A-level students in the UK protested on August 16 in Parliament Square and outside the Department for Education against the downgrading...
Smart billboards: the real-life cookie
Clear Channel is bringing its smart billboards to Europe (in the US they are active since 2016). They use anonymised mobile phone data to give...
New look, new work published
I can’t get rid of the feeling that the new year starts in promising September instead of depressive January. So, I took advantage of Summer to...
The decentralisation of work in face of Covid-19: working from home VS distributed headquarters
It may not have followed the path of a well designed corporate strategy, but undoubtedly Covid-19 has been a significant push for remote work. Big...
New report out: Towards Gender Equality in Digital Welfare
While a growing number of researchers, NGOs, journalists and public authorities is looking at human rights in the digital welfare state, little...
Prosume wins the Blockchains for Social Good Prize
You know I am a blockchain-hype skeptic, but last year I had the chance to collaborate with a company active in the energy industry, Prosume, which...
Police do not prevent crime
One of the best kept secrets of modern life (…) is that police do not prevent crime. The quote is from Police for the Future by the expert in...
Divide et impera
It is a great temptation to picture the digital divide as somebody walking hours to load Internet Explorer on Window 95 in a remote hut....
The EU Digital Policy package: a recap
Today was the day. The European Commission presented its digital policy package. The first meta-component is an overarching strategy for the...
A European approach to Artificial Intelligence
Politico leaked a draft white paper sketching a European approach to artificial intelligence. The document is meant to support the...
4 Things to watch out for in 2020
#1 Big corps making themselves the default option in further fields. Amazon Braket provides a single environment to design, test, and run quantum...
Environmental Intelligence and Deep Adaptation
What if an AI acting as “environmental manager” were to transform the planet regardless of human interest? “A central argument made by those...
Everyday geopolitics: cloud, IoT and smart spaces
A while ago I organised a panel discussion around the working concept of “spaces in-between”, an attempt to put a name on what is left out of the...
The broadcasting internet
June 2019 has been defined as a milestone in Google’s evolution from search engine to walled-garden. Data from 40 million US browser-based searches...
Thoughts for the Anthropocene: click water before leaving the Planet
For some sort of cognitive bias, we tend to think that what is on a map is actually mapped. The time Earth exploration was a journey on a vessel...
Into the wild privacy
I’d like to think of privacy as an experience, taking place in a free off-the-record space where we can just do and be. An experience implies a...
The banality of #FemTech
FemTech reached a 1bn$ in funding between 2015 and 2018, and projections see a raise to $50bn in 2025. FemTech targets women, but...
The devil wears optimisation
I have to admit that in the increasing appropriation and marketing of the “tech for good” debate by big tech, “tech for evil” approaches become very...
The other way around
A recent paper about cognition constraints in digital and physical spaces shows that it is not so straightforward to accuse technology of...
Blockchain for journalism beyond the hype
The media sector is not exempt from the blockchain fascination: in constant seek of a monolith model that will “save the industry”, newsrooms are...
Electric Flanerie
What are your feelings with presence and traceability? I am not talking about mere privacy matters, but a sense of agency, self-awareness, liberty....
Towards a collective intelligence for Europe
The publication "A better place: towards a collective intelligence for Europe" was presented at the European Parliament on March 22, 2019, in the...
Health and caretaking: a Millennials’ narrative
On February 26 2019, the 3rd Millennials workshop Past, present and future of (y)our internet was hosted at the Caixa Forum in Barcelona. The topic was “health and caretaking”
Re-decentralising the internet: panel at Future Fest 2018
Last summer I had the pleasure of being on the panel re-decentralising internet at Futurefest. We had a wonderful discussion with Manon...
Celebrating the Next Generation Internet Awards winners
The Next Generation Internet is an initiative launched by the European Commission to re-imagine and re-engineer the internet through synergies...
You have ten years to save the Planet: Millennials NGI workshop at Web Summit
As part of NGI Move and DataWatchers, Jennifer Veldman and I hosted a Millennials workshop at the Web Summit 2018 in Lisbon. Motivations, hopes,...
Blockchain alone won’t make the Internet decentralised
Main conclusions of the “A secure, decentralised Internet” session at the NGI Forum 2018. Balancing blockchain, governance and business models for a fairer Internet
Everything you need to know about the EU Artificial Intelligence strategy
Europe has finally a united and official position about Artificial Intelligence. On April 25 the European Commission released the communication...
The Space In-Between: The Value of Interpretation and Interaction for the Next Generation Internet
The NGI salon The space in-between: The Value of Interpretation and Interaction for the Next Generation Internet took place on the 2nd...
Can diversity save Europe in the Artificial Intelligence run?
Europe is losing the AI train. While Brussels dispenses politically correct statements about human-centric AI, other zones of the world are headed...
Feminism and minor communication as a chance against the rise of populism
In the ‘80s the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari coined the concept of minor literature. They defined it not...
Value, explore, include, communicate: four considerations from the Next Generation Internet initiative mission at 4YFN
Last week a great delegation representing the Next Generation Internet initiative made it through the European blizzard to Barcelona. The occasion...
All things optimal: beyond machines
In his recent contribution to the Pervasive Labour Union special issue about Entreprecariat, "All things optimal", Michael Dieter elaborates the...
Europe’s economic prosperity and social model rely on its ability to create and disseminate innovation
The recent report "Science, Research and Innovation Performance of the EU 2018 - Strengthening the foundations for Europe's future" insists on the...
Information, trust and disembodiment: Internet and blockchain subtle impact
“Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed”. (Tommaso...
All innovation is social innovation
(This post originally appeared on the Music Tech Fest blog) New technologies are often blamed for an array of societal problems including precarious...
impact17
Imagine setting up a UFO landing site as extreme exercise of hospitality. How would you welcome the most foreigner of the guests? Among all the...
Getting digital social innovation out of the information age
Some thoughts in the run up to the DSI Manifesto Getting Digital Social Innovation Out of the Information Age Despite the recent...