Rob
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robscottdavidson.bsky.social
Rob
@robscottdavidson.bsky.social
12 followers 12 following 11 posts
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Reposted by Rob
balsillieschool.bsky.social
Balsillie Scholar Ana Brandusescu (@anabrandusescu.bsky.social) and a colleague explore discussions at the Paris AI Summit, raising concerns about deregulation, surveillance, and the dominance of major tech companies in shaping AI governance.

montrealethics.ai/the-paris-ai...
The Paris AI Summit: Deregulation, Fear, and Surveillance | Montreal AI Ethics Institute
✍️ Op-Ed by Ana Brandusescu and Prof Renée Sieber. Ana is a PhD Candidate at McGill University and a Balsillie Scholar at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. Prof Sieber is an Associate…
montrealethics.ai
March 12, 2025 at 2:27 PM
robscottdavidson.bsky.social
Publishers sue AI startup Cohere www.linkedin.com/news/story/p...
Publishers sue AI startup Cohere | LinkedIn
Condé Nast, McClatchy and other publishers filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Canadian artificial intelligence startup Cohere.
www.linkedin.com
February 14, 2025 at 3:26 PM
robscottdavidson.bsky.social
@anabrandusescu.bsky.social Did you hear the interview yesterday on CBC with The Citizen Lab's Ron Deibert: www.cbc.ca/listen/live-... jump to 23:56 timestamp
© CBC/Radio-Canada 2025. All rights reserved.
www.cbc.ca
February 10, 2025 at 7:23 PM
robscottdavidson.bsky.social
What to do in between meetings
January 29, 2025 at 4:35 PM
Reposted by Rob
anabrandusescu.bsky.social
New paper alert! Disparity, Instability, and Power in the Crowdmapping Ecosystem by @resieber.bsky.social and me for the Journal of Community Informatics.

openjournals.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/Jo...
Abstract: Crowdmapping is part of an evolution in participatory mapping, which shifted to the Participatory GIS of stand-alone offline software packages, and now embraces numerous online technologies. In community informatics, we focus on the need to sustain these systems, which supposedly has been dramatically eased with the introduction of online mapping tools and has democratized the technology. The literature is largely absent of the ways in which crowdmapping exists in an ecosystem of private sector and nonprofit actors, operating in an arena of non-human artifacts, such as hardware, software, and data. We reflect on five community-based crowdmapping apps in Canada (Montreal and Vancouver) with goals of fighting densification, highlighting lack of affordable housing and family-oriented greenspaces, promoting community assets, increasing findability of healthy food sources, and collecting perceptions of university spaces. We utilized a design ethnography to identify components of our ecosystem and actor-network theory to map the ecosystem. Our findings reveal the crowdmapping ecosystem 1 faced several interoperability challenges for technical implementation, which brought into sharp relief the disparate skill levels and resource capacities of developer and communities as well as the ability to respond to almost daily modifications in hardware, software, and data; 2 relied on an ever-shifting network of individuals and organizations in large part because of unsustainable business models serving a top-down governance; and 3 exposed power differentials among a mix of funders, tech-for-good nonprofits, private sector hardware and software providers, and the underlying non-human actors. Lessons learned from this ecosystem inform crowdmapping as it evolves and engages newer actors and technologies, which further inform community-based organizations as well as researchers and philanthropic funders who may promote overly complex solutions to suit particular agendas.
January 8, 2025 at 9:41 PM
Reposted by Rob
anabrandusescu.bsky.social
"AI agents are designed to make us forget their true allegiance as they whisper to us in humanlike tones. These are manipulation engines, marketed as seamless convenience."

www.wired.com/story/ai-age...
AI Agents Will Be Manipulation Engines
Surrendering to algorithmic agents risks putting us under their influence.
www.wired.com
January 7, 2025 at 8:09 PM
robscottdavidson.bsky.social
Great opportunity! www.linkedin.com/posts/joe-po...
Joe Powell on LinkedIn: Open Government Partnership hiring Director, Policy & Partnerships in…
Brilliant opportunity to play a leading role in global open government and democracy work - at a time the world really needs it!
www.linkedin.com
August 31, 2023 at 2:15 PM
robscottdavidson.bsky.social
@robscottd.bsky.social my workstation today
August 28, 2023 at 1:21 PM
robscottdavidson.bsky.social
PEI oysters - yum!
August 22, 2023 at 1:26 PM
Reposted by Rob
ainowinstitute.bsky.social
The codependence between corporate power and resource-intensive AI curbs the potential of ‘openness’ in AI as a democratizing force: a new paper by @smw.bsky.social, @meredithmeredith.bsky.social, and David Gray Widder tells us how: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4543807
Open (For Business): Big Tech, Concentrated Power, and the Political Economy of Open AI
This paper examines ‘open’ AI in the context of recent attention to open and open source AI systems. We find that the terms ‘open’ and ‘open source’ are used in
papers.ssrn.com
August 21, 2023 at 2:40 PM
robscottdavidson.bsky.social
Last week, Lana and I cooked up some fresh local mussels in PEI!
August 21, 2023 at 5:55 PM