2021

Self-Sovereign Identity

“Who are you?”. Answering that may seem at once easy and yet incredibly complex.  In the real world, we are born with, gain or develop aspects of our identity.  But distinguishing who is who is a lot more complex online. 

Worklife in the Disinformation Industry

If you did not know by now, rest assured there is a thriving disinformation industry.  But have you ever wondered how it actually works? Who are companies who provide it? Who are the workers who act as Trolls, and why

The Metaverse — Living the Dream?

The next iteration of the Internet, is called the “metaverse”. It is where we anticipate our physical and virtual worlds will converge. But options differ on what it will look like or if and how it will be controlled.  Will the Metaverse

When Cutting Edge Technology Leads to Unintended Consequences

We are in a technical revolution where cutting edge innovations in areas such as AI, 5G, robotics, and even gene editing, offer enormous promises for our lives, ranging from the mundane to the spectacular. Our persistent optimism overestimates the positive

COVID Passports — a multinational perspective

Vaccination status – namely, who IS and who IS NOT vaccinated is hotly debated on every front. The Covid-19/vaccine passport purports to help.  These passports are digital or paper documents that show you were vaccinated against COVID-19, and/or have recently tested negative for

A world in flux — our relationship with change

The pandemic and its massive impact on every aspect of our lives for the past 18 months has been a wakeup call on change, especially that which we cannot control.   For centuries, our human ingenuity has sought to control

Better Communicating with Context

Does online interface design shape or influence how we behave online? For example, do we really behave worse than our true selves when given the option to mask our identity? When technologies that obfuscate online activities, mask identities or create

Free Speech — It’s more than just the words

On Jan 11th, 2021, Parler, the alt right social media platform, found itself turned off and homeless, as Internet giants such as Amazon, Apple and Google, all booted it from their platforms in little more than 24 hours. The decision

Rethinking Machine Learning

Machine Learning, or ML, is attributed as a natural outgrowth of the intersection of Computer Science and Statistics. Machine Learning builds on both and focuses on the question of how to get computers to program themselves from an initial structure

Hacking the Pandemic: Taiwan’s Approach

When historians write the chapter on the COVID-19 pandemic, they will have plenty of cautionary examples, except maybe Taiwan.  Taiwan may well provide the lesson in not only battling a public health crisis but also in civic engagement, innovation and