[ecrea] CFP: Streams of Consciousness: Data, Cognition and Intelligent Devices

STREAMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS: DATA, COGNITION AND INTELLIGENT DEVICES

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

Website: http://warwick.ac.uk/streamsofconsciousness


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) <mailto:(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.


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