My research on privacy, profiling, algorithms, automated Learning and societal impact of smart technology

This page gathers some of my multidisciplinary work involving ethics of algorithms in general, with applications in library science, archival science, and the impact of algorithms on society. Some of my work is about algorithmic literacy: making algorithmic decision making understandable for people inside and outside AI.

New paper (with M. Atzmueller) at the XAILA workshop on explainable AI for law, as part of the JURIX conference on legal AI. The title is: On Requirements and Design Criteria for Explainability in Legal AI. You can have a look here.

Invited talk at the Open University about the values of artificial intelligence, see my slides

Participated in the lunch debate on the future of robotics and AI at the EU in Brussels, during the 10th European Innovation Summit

Did a guest lecture on working with algorithms and value-aligned AI at the university of Leuven in Belgium.

I have presented decision-theoretic ethical programs at BNAIC-2018 and also as a poster at BeneRL

Participating in the Digital Society Conference, research and education workshops on responsible data science

I discussed the Ethics of AI with an audience in the main library of Utrecht, and you can find the full video registration here. It was based on an episode of the "Tegenlicht" documentary series, about "man in the machine", see here

I gave a two-hour lecture at the international summerschool on AI, Algorithms & Privacy on the topic of reinforcement learning, AI and value alignment to build ethical AI systems

M. van Otterlo (2018) Ethics and the value(s) of Artificial Intelligence, NAW 5/19 nr. 3 september 2018. You can download it here.

Grzegorz J. Nalepa, Martijn van Otterlo, Szymon Bobek and Martin Atzmueller, From Context Mediation to Declarative Values and Explainability, accepted at the IJCAI 2018 Workshop on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), Stockholm, July. Download here.

Martijn van Otterlo (2018) From Algorithmic Black Boxes to Adaptive White Boxes: Declarative Decision-Theoretic Ethical Programs as Codes of Ethics Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society, see on here and arXiv

Martijn van Otterlo (2017) Gatekeeping Algorithms with Human Ethical Bias: The ethics of algorithms in archives, libraries and society, First Monday, accepted (to appear, preprint available here)

van Otterlo, M. (2017) From intended archivists to intentional algivists: Ethical codes for humans and machines in the archives . In Archives in Liquid Times, Smit, F.; Glaudemans, A.; and Jonker, R., (eds.). This book will be presented in December 2017, where I will give an invited talk. The complete book can be downloaded here

The book on Algorithmic Life edited by Louise Amoore and Volha Piotukh (with Routledge) just came out before Christmas 2015! And it has my chapter in it titled The libraryness of calculative devices: Artificially intelligent librarians and their impact on information consumption (2016) (about privacy, algorithmic gatekeeping, the future of the library and nice Lego pictures of course...) A draft chapter can be downloaded as well. I presented it first at the International Calculative Devices Conference in Durham UK, November 2013

van Otterlo, M. and Feldberg, J.F.M. (2016) Van kaas naar big data: Data science Alkmaar, het living lab van Noord-Holland Noord, Bestuurskunde, 1, pp. 29-34, ISSN 0927 3387

van Otterlo, M. (2016) Project BLIIPS: Making the Physical Public Library more Intelligent through Artificial Intelligence, in proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries (QQML2016)
The above paper is now published in QQML journal

M. van Otterlo -- Automated Experimentation in Walden 3.0. : The Next step in Profiling, Predicting, Control and Surveillance in: Surveillance and Society, (2014) volume 12, number 2, link to the full paper and abstract"

My article in Trouw (Dutch newspaper) on 10th Sep 2014 deals with the decreasing influence of individuals on privacy, manipulation and behavioral engineering

I wrote a position paper (2014) on the future of the declaration of human rights and whether, in the context of algorithms, we need new modifications in the digital future. It was used in an expert panel organised by Amnesty to develop a new strategy for the digital world (Martijn van Otterlo, Broadening the Privacy Concept in the Digital Age: Adjusting rights?)

M. van Otterlo Counting Sheep: Automated profiling, predictions and control at the Amsterdam Privacy Conference (7-10 October 2012). It basically tries to extrapolate (in a cautious, constructive and technically plausible way) from profiling as Big Brother to profiling as leading to what I call Walden 3.0, see this working paper

M. van Otterlo (2013) A Machine Learning Perspective on Profiling in Privacy, Due process and the Computational Turn: Philosophers of Law meet Philosophers of Technology Hildebrandt and de Vries (eds.) 2013, Routledge.
A draft (somewhat longer) version can be found here Parts of this work have been presented at:
The International Conference on Computers, Privacy and Data Protection (2011, Philosopher's reading panel, invited talk)
CTIT Symposium "Security and Privacy - something to worry about?" (Enschede, The Netherlands, Tuesday June 7th, 2011, invited talk)
Projected Worlds: Data, Digitisation and Decision (Newcastle, UK, 3-4 November 2011, invited talk)

Activities on ethics of algorithms

Invited talk on Hoe overleef ik de archivistische singulariteit? (English: How to Survive the coming archivistic singularity) at the book launch of Archives in Liquid Times, see here for a program and information about the book.

Guest lecture on privacy and big data (ethics of algorithms wrt manipulation and profiling) at the KU Leuven (Belgium), master students AI, November 2017

Keynote talk at the International Workshop Information interactions 2017 on "The ethics of artificially intelligent algorithms in society, public libraries and archives" (Bratislava, Slovakia)

Review Panel member for the evaluation of postdoc proposals in the theme "risk, data and technology", Strassbourg, France, 2017 organized by the European Science Foundation (ESF)

Guest lecture on ethics of algorithms at the Universite St. Louis (Brussels, Belgium), April 2017

Talk on Libraries, ethics and algorithms at the Spring Workshop on Machine Learning organized by the DTAI group, May 2017

keynote speaker at QQML 2017 on the interplay between technical algorithms and the ethical consequences of applying them in library contexts
van Otterlo, M. (2017) Technical fixes and ethical challenges for activity monitoring in physical public libraries through big data and artificial intelligence --- Invited talk at the 9th International Conference on Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries (QQML2017) in Limerick, Ireland (May 2017)

Working on various topics dealing with the future of the (public) library, algorithms for curating and gatekeeping, intellectual privacy, and all that. It is all related to my BLIIPS project

I have set up a completely new course on the ethics of algorithms, see my teaching page.

Guest lecture on algorithmic governance issues at the Universite St. Louis (Brussels, Belgium), April 2016

I was involved in the construction of a special journal issue on "big data", algorithmic governance and all that (published in 2016, see here)

Guest lecture on "working with algorithms" for the bachelor course on (digital innovation) (VU, Amsterdam), February 2016

Guest lecture on the consequences of big data and analytics (Leuven, Belgium), November 2015

Guest lecture on the "working with algorithms" for the master course on (digital innovation) (VU, Amsterdam), November 2015

Guest lecture on algorithmic governance, privacy, surveillance and big data for AI master students in Leuven, December 2014

I participated in an expert panel organized by Amnesty International about the consequences of "big data" for human rights (yes.... I wrote a position paper, see above) (Nov 2014)

I lectured in a seminar for master students in design about the consequences of "big data" for identity, design and manufacturing at the Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam (Nov 2014)

I was a discussion parter for Evgeny Morozov when he was in Nijmegen for a Soeterbeeck seminar on his new book in October 2014

In February 2014 I talked about "Digital Globalisation and Globale Digitalisation" (AI, Big data and so on) during a debate night organised by Amnesty International in Nijmegen.

A nice piece in De Correspondent that talks about metaphors for privacy and surveillance aspects discusses my Walden 3.0. metaphor as well.

In June 2013 during the Smilee workshop in Maastricht, I talked about "Traveling from Manhattan to Walden 3.0. : Privacy risks of machine learning, profiling and automated experimentation"

I was interviewed by Jolein de Rooij about a Microsoft patent This interview was published in Intermediar-PW,January 2012.