Helen Nissenbaum: Good morn­ing. Welcome every­body. I’m Helen Nissenbaum, and I’m delight­ed to wel­come back those who were here last night, and wel­come those who have just joined us today. As you know this is the sec­ond day of our con­fer­ence on gov­ern­ing algo­rithms and we’ve already been treat­ed to two out­stand­ing pre­sen­ta­tions by Bob Tarjan and Claudia Perlich, with insights into what…well, a lit­tle bit into what algo­rithms do. And today we con­tin­ue to explore the social, philo­soph­i­cal, eth­i­cal, legal sig­nif­i­cance of algorithms. 

I have a few intro­duc­to­ry remarks that will be sim­i­lar to some of what I said last night, but I do want to thank and express appre­ci­a­tion and recog­ni­tion first of all for the insti­tu­tion­al spon­sors of this event, Media, Culture, and Communication, a depart­ment at NYU in which I’m a pro­fes­sor. I’m not sure if I men­tioned, I’m Helen Nissenbaum, a pro­fes­sor of media, cul­ture, and com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and direc­tor of the Information Law Institute.

The sec­ond of our spon­sors is the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing. And I wel­come sev­er­al of my col­leagues from that cen­ter to this event today. 

And the third is the Information Law Institute at New York University’s law school, which is a research cen­ter devot­ed to law and pol­i­cy as they relate to infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy, infor­ma­tion, and dig­i­tal media, not only to deep­en under­stand­ing but to make a pos­i­tive impact. 

Now, for those of you who’ve just joined us I want to men­tion sev­er­al peo­ple, indi­vid­u­als, who’ve con­tributed in cru­cial ways to just this event exist­ing and also to the spec­tac­u­lar line­up and mate­r­i­al that has been devel­oped for it. 

Katherine Strandberg, who helped steer the Information Law Institute. And by the way you’ll get to know some of the these peo­ple through­out the day. I should Nicole Arzt and Dove Pedlosky who are not—I don’t think they’re in the room with us today. Nicole is the admin­is­tra­tor of the Information Law insti­tute. And Dove Pedlosky is the Associate Director for External Relations in the depart­ment of Media, Culture, and Communication. And they worked real­ly real­ly hard toward this event. 

Solon Barocas, a PhD stu­dent in media, cul­ture, and com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and a fel­low of Information Law Institute, who helped with the con­cep­tion of this event, with steer­ing its intel­lec­tu­al direc­tion, for iden­ti­fy­ing many of the real­ly great speak­ers that we have for you today. 

And of course this event is has pre­dom­i­nant­ly being orga­nized and devel­oped by Malte Zeiwitz, who will give some sub­stan­tive intro­duc­to­ry remarks after me, and Sophie Hood, who we’ve been enor­mous­ly lucky to have as post­doc­tor­al research fel­lows of the Information Law Institute and Media, Culture, and Communication. Among the var­i­ous things that the Informational Law Institute does, we spon­sor a pri­va­cy research group. And I see some famil­iar faces from that. We meet on a week­ly basis and in addi­tion to that we are for­tu­nate to be able to spon­sor some legal research fel­lows and post­doc­tor­al fel­lows, and we always have sev­er­al vis­it­ing fac­ul­ty fel­lows and stu­dent fel­lows from all over the world and the United States. 

Now, it’s not real­ly pos­si­ble in the few min­utes I have to say how much Malte and Sophie have giv­en of them­selves for this event. In addi­tion to plan­ning this event and all the details of it, they’ve also cre­at­ed a mate­r­i­al back­end which some of you may have seen which will serve as a resource even as this con­fer­ence ends. And we hope that the resource will grow so that those of us who are inter­est­ed in the field will have some­thing to go to and pre­sum­ably to con­tribute to. And what I also want to rec­og­nize is that many of you in the room are experts in your own rights, and you’ve con­tributed to this resource and you join us from far and wide. And we’re very grate­ful for that. So wel­come and over to Malte Zeiwitz.