UC Berkeley School of Information

We show that Social Security numbers (SSNs) can be accurately predicted from widely available public data, such as individuals' dates and states of birth. Using only publicly available information, we observed a correlation between individuals' SSNs and their birth data, and found that for younger cohorts the correlation allows statistical inference of private SSNs, thereby heightening the risks of identity theft for millions of US residents. The inferences are made possible by the public availability of the Social Security Administration's Death Master File and the widespread accessibility of personal information from multiple sources, such as data brokers or profiles on social networking sites. Our results highlight the unexpected privacy consequences of the complex interactions among multiple data sources in modern information economies, and quantify novel privacy risks associated with information revelation in public forums. They also highlight how well-meaning policies in the area of information security

Innovation drives economic growth, our quality of life and is the only hope of addressing the major challenges we face. But America, a cornerstone of innovation throughout the world, has become increasingly short-sighted. By taking innovation for granted we threaten not only our own strength, but the overall global economy. Judy Estrin, technology and business pioneer and author of the new book Closing the Innovation Gap, will talk about how it is essential to reignite sustainable innovation in business, education and government and what is required of business and national leaders to revive organizational, national and the global Innovation Ecosystem.

The Wikipedia Revolution is the first narrative account of the remarkable success story of the "encyclopedia anyone can edit." Andrew Lih, a Wikipedia editor/administrator, academic and journalist, tells how the Internet's free culture community inspired its creation in 2001, and how legions of volunteers have emerged to create over 10 million articles in over 50 languages. The book recounts colorful behind-the-scenes stories of how obsessive map editors, automated software robots, and warring factions have come to shape a complex online community of knowledge gatherers. Learn about the historical underpinnings of Wikipedia: how a Hawaiian vacation and a fringe piece software from Apple Computer inspired the wiki concept and realized the original read-and-write capabilities of the Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web. While Wikipedia has become firmly planted at the top of Google's search results, what are the challenges as sum of all human knowledge becomes more complete, and its problem is not growth, but reli

For 35 years, Dr. John Rutledge has traveled the world advising governments, corporations, pension funds and individual investors on how to create, grow and manage wealth. Dr. Rutledge appears weekly on Forbes on Fox, and is co-host of Fox Business' new live call-in show for people who want to start their own businesses. In his most recent book, Lessons from a Road Warrior, Dr. Rutledge traces the development of his ideas from his boyhood lessons in Winthrop Harbor, Illinois, to his easy-to-understand thermo-economics framework for investing that shapes the way he sees the world today. He uses this thermodynamics-based framework, as well as recent advances in information theory, to help the reader understand the important economic, financial and political forces that shape our lives and determine the value of our homes and stock portfolios. Dr. Rutledge will focus largely on the book's later chapters on nonequilibrium thermodynamics, network failures and the information economy, and the role pla

The network research community has been challenging itself to conceive of what our global network of 15 years from now should be. While the Internet of today is a great success, it also has limitations that suggest it may not be well-positioned to meet all the requirements we will face as we move into the future. As we consider design options for a future network, we have come to realize that some of the original design decisions, while effective, were not the only way to go. In fact, we could have taken different forks in the road as we designed, and ended up in very different places, perhaps with a network that is equally effective at supporting a wide range of applications, but different in other ways: more secure, easier to install and manage, better aligned to motivate investment, and so on. In this talk, I will identify a few of these alternate designs, and describe how the network they would induce would differ from what we see today. In doing so, I will try to illustrate both the nature of the design

The much touted “Internet of Things” requires a global IT infrastructure providing information about "things" in a secure and reliable manner. The EPCglobal Network is a popular industry proposal for such an IT infrastructure. Here, the "things" referred to are physical objects carrying RFID tags with a unique Electronic Product Code (EPC). A DNS-based Object Naming Service (ONS) locates the information sources relevant for a given object. In this talk, we show that EPCglobal's current design harbors some serious privacy and security risks. We also discuss some counter-measures and their effectiveness. In particular, we show how distributed hash tables (DHTs) can be used to improve data access control to reduce dependencies on individual root name servers, and to increase privacy. The strength of privacy protection, however, depends on the availability of secure out-of-band key distribution mechanisms.

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley School of Information, the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), and the UC Services Science, Management, and Engineering Program Uses of novel digital technologies often start with students and are eventually adopted, initially reluctantly, by enterprises. For the past six years much of Grudin's research has focused on early enterprise adoption of communication technologies including instant messaging, weblogs, wikis, and social networking software such as Facebook and LinkedIn. The first half of this presentation will outline a handful of patterns that emerged in Grudin's 20 years of studying technology adoption. Grudin will follow with an overview of enterprise uses of emerging technologies, with some speculation as to where it may be heading.

Large museums try to make extensive use of new media to communicate with their public, but with only limited success. Apart from providing practical information about hours, locations, and shows, museum websites chiefly serve the needs of experts, and do little to prepare ordinary museum-goers for their visits. In this talk, I will report on research done in collaboration with the Roman Forum, the Galleria Borghese, and the Palazzo Barbarini in Rome and the archaeological site of Pompei, and in particular on a study of visitors to the Vatican Museums.

Contemporary practices of gathering, analyzing, and disseminating personal information have placed impossible demands on the concept of privacy. The weight of these demands, in turn, is reflected in norms, laws, policies, and technical requirements that frequently seem to miss the mark, failing to negotiate a reasonable course between unbridled opportunism, on the one hand, and suspicious intransigence, on the other. This talk will present key elements in the theory of contextual integrity, which builds upon structural aspects of social life to enrich our understanding of privacy and its importance as a moral and political value. Allowing context-relative social norms and context-based social values into the scope of analysis enables nuance and subtle discrimination, often missing in other dominant approaches, in modeling and theorizing privacy as well as adjudicating and justifying particular privacy claims.

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley School of Information, the Berkeley Center for New Media, Mass Communications at UC Berkeley, and the UC Berkeley Library When Time Magazine named “YOU” as their 2006 Person of the Year, it highlighted what has been deemed the democratization of the media. The term “Web 2.0” was coined to describe this transformation on the internet, where individual volunteers, not institutions, control its content. But many people share doubts about the hype around Web 2.0 and have different ideas about what's significant, what's trivial, and what's irrelevant. Protagonists, such as Andrew Keen, believe that it is not only significant, but is significant enough to threaten “our economy, our culture, and our values.” Please join UC Berkeley Adjunct Professor Paul Duguid and Andrew Keen in a debate about whether Web 2.0 is truly a threat to our culture. Adjunct Professor Geoffrey Nunberg will moderate the debate.

Audio recording (MP3) According to recent studies by the Pew Center on the Internet And American Life, more than half of American teens online have produced media content and about a third have circulated media that they have produced beyond their immediate friends and family. These statistics reflect the growing importance of participatory culture in the everyday lives of American young people. Work across a range of disciplines suggest that these emerging forms of participatory culture are important sites for informal learning and may be the crucible out of which new conceptions of civic engagement are emerging. Drawing on insights from a recent white paper produced for the MacArthur Foundation, this talk will discuss the need to develop new forms of media literacy pedagogy which reflects this context of a participatory culture, materials which both respond to the ethical challenges confronted by those teens who are already producing and circulating their own media as well as the challenges confronting tho

In a rapidly-changing, uncertain environment, the ability to think constructively about various future possibilities is more important than ever. "Foresight Specialists", "Scenario Planners", "Trend Spotters" and good old "Futurists" provide a specialized service that few businesses, non-profits, and governments have organically -- and fewer still recognize that they need. I'll talk about why today's futurism has more to do with imagining the possible than thinking the unthinkable, why futurist ethics matters more than futurist economics, and whether futurism might just be the best job out there for the easily-distracted generalist.

A comparative look at the origins, development, and impact of major information technology platforms of the past three decades from the perspective of a leading entrepreneur and software designer who has played a major role in each of them.

Audio recording (MP3) A comparative look at the origins, development, and impact of major information technology platforms of the past three decades from the perspective of a leading entrepreneur and software designer who has played a major role in each of them.

While much of the focus on intellectual property goes to battles over copyright or patents, we should not forget that a large proportion of such material is not property at all. The public domain is available for all to use. Of particular interest for the public domain is the U.S. government, all of whose work is available without restriction for all of us to use. In this lecture, Carl Malamud explains the principles of the public domain with particular emphasis on the works of government. He will discuss how government often backs away from the clear principle of no property interests in order to maintain control, and how citizens can change that attitude through concrete actions. Malamud will use his own experience in forcing changes in government policy with numerous agencies to illustrate these general principles. (A Flash presentation including the audio and Carl's slides/movies is available here.)

In this age where QWERTY communication and point-and-click are implied when I say social networking, face to face can sometimes seem like an inappropriate intrusion and unnecessary add-on — certainly something that we don't need to design for when we outline our services. I will describe a series of studies we did where we blurred boundaries between online and physical space social networking using desktop, personal device and public screen displays, and recent work on the move from online socializing to offline meeting among internet daters. I will use these studies to highlight the omissions in our design reasoning and concomitant surprises. I will more generally speculate on some issues that arise when we extrapolate tacit or explicit metaphors of online sociality to the offline world, and vice versa.

A comparative look at the origins, development, and impact of major information technology platforms of the past three decades from the perspective of a leading entrepreneur and software designer who has played a major role in each of them.

Search has become a critical part of our daily lives and the primary gateway to information and services of all kinds. Much of the success has been driven by the growth of the internet and behind-the-scenes improvements in search technology. However, the search user interface, based on keywords and advanced search operators, has changed very little since the earliest information retrieval systems. In this talk, we discuss the concept of natural language search. Central to this is a new user experience, in which users express queries in natural language and the system responses respect the linguistic information in the query. To realize this vision at broad scope and scale will require advances in a variety of technology areas, including natural language processing, information extraction, knowledge representation, and large-scale search indexing and retrieval systems. In addition, it will require innovations in user interface. Issues include changing user behavior, education, supporting users in formulating e

Users, aided by improvements in computer and communications technology, are increasingly developing their own new products and services: Innovation is being democratized. User-innovators—both individuals and firms—often freely share their innovations with others, creating user-innovation communities and a rich intellectual commons. The trend toward democratized innovation affects both information products and physical products. Innovation by users can produce an increase in social welfare relative to a manufacturer-only innovation system. Innovation by "lead users" can provide a valuable feedstock for manufacturer innovation. It also can disrupt manufacturers' existing business models. User innovation is so robust that it can actually drive manufacturers out of product design in some fields.