Technology can transform the way we live our lives – as much in positive as in negative ways – and redefine what it means to be human.
Technology and Humanity
How can we ensure that technological change happens responsibly, and that it promotes an equitable and sustainable society?
Theme members
Lead: Dr Nicole Vincent
Current members: Associate Professor Tony (Weidong) Huang, Dr Shibani Antonette
Our world is filled with technologies, which transform our lives in numerous ways. Yet, as history shows, most of the ways in which technology changes our lives are neither intended nor anticipated.
For instance, the internal combustion engine didn’t just replace horse-drawn carriages with cars. It also enabled produce to be grown in far off places, and for people to live further from work. This radically altered the size and shape of cities, created food growing regions in temperate climates, and literally changed what’s on our dinner plates. It has also fuelled wars in regions where crude oil is located.
Similarly, Joseph Lister’s use of carbolic acid as a surgical disinfectant in 1865 marked the start of antiseptic surgery. By killing bacteria, carbolic acid prevented sepsis and saved countless lives. At the same time, though, it also unintentionally changed the law, as surgeons eventually became legally required to use disinfectants, or risk being sued for negligence.
By altering our capacities – what we can do – technology influences our choices and what we actually do — how we rest, play, live, work, and think. Technology shapes what we notice, reflect upon, seek out, try to avoid, and tell others about. It even affects how we understand ourselves, how we interact with each other, and what we expect of one another.
But because we tend to focus on technologies that almost glow in the dark – electronic gadgets with shiny screens, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, smart drugs, gene editing, nanotechnology, synthetic biology, etc – many technologies are not even noticed or recognised as technology. Furthermore, because we are most focused on immediate, quantifiable, and unambiguous examples of harm – medical mishaps, privacy infringements, violations of human rights and principles of justice – temporally distant and qualitatively different effects of technology which are less easily characterised, evaluated, or predicted tend to be obscured. This makes the influence of many technologies on us and on society insidious, difficult to forecast, evaluate, and control.
Projects in the Technology and Humanity stream showcase how our lives are shaped by all kinds of technology, and they underscore the importance of humans taking responsibility for technological change. Not just to avoid existential threats or to create more just and sustainable societies – though these things clearly matter – but to also play an active role in shaping our own future, rather than allowing our future to be decided for us through blind technological innovation fuelled by market competition.
Showcased Projects
Human Rights & Technology Project
We live in a world perfused with technology and increasingly intelligent machines. And like all human tools, technology can be used for good or for ill. The 21st century marks a juncture in history where, as a society, we need to stop, take stock, and reflect on what fundamental principles we will use to shape our emerging technology. Universities have a critical role to play in this inquiry. As institutions for public benefit, they provide a neutral space in which to examine and analyse the impact of emerging technologies. They also hold connections to community, industry and other institutions that help to facilitate an inclusive dialogue around this important issue.
Convened through the Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion, our partnership with the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) takes the inquiry across disciplinary boundaries to open up a holistic and inclusive dialogue. We will further explore the potential for emerging technologies to both affect and promote human rights. The project will Identify the practical issues at stake, undertake research and public consultation on how best to respond to the human rights challenges and opportunities presented by new technology, and develop a practical and innovative roadmap for reform. For details, see https://www.uts.edu.au/partners-and-community/initiatives/social-justice-uts/programs-and-initiatives/exploring-human-rights-technology
Data and technology in Education
Research in this area draws from the fields of learning analytics, educational data mining, and artificial intelligence in education to integrate technology for improving teaching and learning practices. It is closely tied with the research theme on transformative learning with examples of ethical and productive use of data and technology in future classrooms. Work involves participatory design of tools and technologies that help educators and students in better learning. Research also involves the use of novel automated methods to advance previous manual ways of uncovering insights from educational data. This includes the application of machine learning, text mining, sensors and artificial intelligence technologies to improve our understanding of learning processes. Related publications:
- Simon Knight, Antonette Shibani, Sophie Abel, Andrew Gibson, Philippa Ryan, Nicole Sutton, Raechel Wight, Cherie Lucas, Ágnes Sándor, Kirsty Kitto, Ming Liu, Radhika Vijay Mogarkar & Simon Buckingham Shum (2020). AcaWriter: A learning analytics tool for formative feedback on academic writing. Journal of Writing Research. https://doi.org/10.17239/jowr-2020.12.01.06
- Antonette Shibani, Simon Knight & Simon Buckingham Shum (2020). Educator Perspectives on Learning Analytics in Classroom Practice. The Internet and Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2020.100730.
- Antonette Shibani (2020) Constructing Automated Revision Graphs: A Novel Visualization Technique to Study Student Writing. In: I. Bittencourt, M. Cukurova, K. Muldner, R. Luckin, & E. Millán (Eds.), Artificial intelligence in Education – AIED 2020. LNCS: Vol. 12163 (pp. 285-290). Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-52240-7_52
- Roberto Martinez-Maldonado, Vanessa Echeverria, Jurgen Schulte, Antonette Shibani, Katerina Mangaroska, Simon Buckingham Shum (2020) Moodoo: Indoor Positioning Analytics for Characterising Classroom Teaching [Awarded BEST RESEARCH PAPER]. In: I. Bittencourt, M. Cukurova, K. Muldner, R. Luckin, & E. Millán (Eds.) Artificial intelligence in Education – AIED 2020. LNCS: Vol. 12163 (pp. 360-373). Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-52237-7_29
- Wanli Xing, Hee-Sun Lee and Antonette Shibani (2020). Identifying patterns in students’ scientific argumentation: content analysis through text mining using Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Educational Technology Research and Development. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-020-09761-w.
- Simon Knight (2020). Augmenting Assessment with Learning Analytics. In M. Bearman, P. Dawson, R. Ajjawi, J. Tai, & D. Boud (Eds.), Re-imagining University Assessment in a Digital World. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41956-1_10.
- Simon Knight, Andrew Gibson and Antonette Shibani (2020). Implementing Learning Analytics for Learning Impact: Taking Tools to Task. The Internet and Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2020.100729.
- Antonette Shibani, Simon Knight and Simon Buckingham Shum (2019). Contextualizable Learning Analytics Design: A Generic Model, and Writing Analytics Evaluations. In Proceedings of LAK19: Ninth International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge, Tempe, Arizona (ACM Press). https://doi.org/10.1145/3303772.3303785
- Kirsty Kitto & Simon Knight (2019). Practical ethics for building learning analytics. British Journal of Educational Technology. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12868.
- Simon Knight, Antonette Shibani & Simon Buckingham Shum (2018). Augmenting Formative Writing Assessment with Learning Analytics: A Design Abstraction Approach. In J. Kay & R. Luckin (Eds.), 13th International Conference of the Learning Sciences: Rethinking Learning in the Digital Age. Making the Learning Sciences Count (Vol. 3, pp. 1783–1790). London, UK: International Society of the Learning Sciences
- Antonette Shibani, Simon Knight, Simon Buckingham Shum & Philippa Ryan (2017). Design and Implementation of a Pedagogic Intervention Using Writing Analytics. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Computers in Education. New Zealand: Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education
- Andrew Gibson, Adam Aitken, Agnes Sándor, Simon Buckingham Shum, Cherie Tsingos-Lucas & Simon Knight (2017). Reflective Writing Analytics for Actionable Feedback. Proceedings of LAK17: 7th International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge, 13–17 March, 2017, Vancouver, BC, Canada. (ACM Press). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3027385.3027436. [Awarded BEST FULL RESEARCH PAPER]
- Elizabeth Koh, Antonette Shibani, Jennifer Pei-Ling Tan & Helen Hong (2016). A pedagogical framework for learning analytics in collaborative inquiry tasks: an example from a teamwork competency awareness program. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge (LAK ’16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 74-83. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2883851.2883914
- Antonette Shibani, Elizabeth Koh, Vivian Lai and Kyong Jin Shim (2017). Assessing the language of chat for teamwork dialogue. Educational Technology & Society, 20(2), 224–237. https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/handle/10453/126957
- Antonette Shibani, Elizabeth Koh & Helen Hong (2015) Text mining approach to automate teamwork assessment in group chats. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Learning Analytics And Knowledge (LAK ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 434-435. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2723576.2723648
- Society of Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR) Podcast episode hosted by Antonette Shibani featuring Ed de Quincey and Kenneth Holstein as guests, discussing ways to involve stakeholders such as students and teachers in the design of learning analytics using participatory design approaches: https://soundcloud.com/user-916492194/episode-03-giving-a-voice-to-stakeholders-in-learning-analytics-design
- SoLAR Podcast episode hosted by Antonette Shibani featuring Paul Prinsloo and Kirsty Kitto as guests. They talk about privacy and ethical concerns in learning analytics and ways to overcome them: https://soundcloud.com/user-916492194/ep06-privacy-and-ethics-in-learning-analytics
Helping-Hands Technology for Remote collaboration
Remote collaboration is becoming increasingly crucial, especially currently when travel is restricted because of the Covid-19 pandemic. People are looking for real-time and no-travel solutions to enable remote collaboration with colleagues and experts, and the increase in remote collaboration could have globally significant socioeconomic impact over the long term. More specifically, in remote collaboration on physical tasks, a local worker operates on physical objects under the guidance from a remote helper, such as remote machine maintenance. It has been widely agreed that one of the main issues with remote collaboration is that there is no longer common ground for collaboration partners to communicate the same way as they do when they are co-located. Much research has been done in providing collaborators with access to a shared visual space with hand gestures in order to achieve common ground for effective communication. Related publications:
- Seungwon Kim, Gun Lee, Mark Billinghurst, Weidong Huang: The combination of visual communication cues in mixed reality remote collaboration. Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces (2020).
- Weidong Huang, Seungwon Kim, Mark Billinghurst, Leila Alem: Sharing hand gestures and sketch cues in remote collaboration. J. Vis. Commun. Image Represent. 58: 428-438 (2019)
- Troels Ammitsbøl Rasmussen, Weidong Huang: SceneCam: Improving Multi-camera Remote Collaboration using Augmented Reality. ISMAR Adjunct 2019: 28-33
- Seungwon Kim, Gun A. Lee, Weidong Huang, Hayun Kim, Woontack Woo, Mark Billinghurst: Evaluating the Combination of Visual Communication Cues for HMD-based Mixed Reality Remote Collaboration. CHI 2019: 173
- Weidong Huang, Leila Alem, Franco Tecchia, Henry Been-Lirn Duh: Augmented 3D hands: a gesture-based mixed reality system for distributed collaboration. J. Multimodal User Interfaces 12(2): 77-89 (2018)
- Carey Mather, Tony Barnett, Vlasti Broucek, Annette Saunders, Darren Grattidge, Weidong Huang: Helping Hands: Using Augmented Reality to Provide Remote Guidance to Health Professionals. CSHI 2017: 57-62
- Weidong Huang, Leila Alem: Gesturing in the Air: Supporting Full Mobility in Remote Collaboration on Physical Tasks. J. Univers. Comput. Sci. 19(8): 1158-1174 (2013)