As modern life increasingly moves online, our ability to
understand the impact of the Internet on society has grown critically
dependent upon the benevolence of tech platforms. To date, corporate
data sharing programs have largely failed to meet the needs of the
research community aimed at this problem. In this talk, the
shortcomings of previous corporate data sharing initiatives and identify
requirements that must be met by future systems will be outlined. In
addition, Mozilla Rally, a data platform that addresses some of these
system requirements will be presented. The talk will focus on the
following properties of Mozilla Rally: user data donation and
concomitant consent architectures, alternative corporate governance
models, and community-led software development and release practices.
The talk concludes with discussion of lessons learned during the
creation of Rally, as well as possible future directions that similar
efforts could take.
Bio:
Rebecca Weiss is an award-winning computational social scientist and
data science leader. She has worked in academia and industry, applying
innovative methods to large-scale data sets to better understand online
environments and their behavioral consequences.
As head of research and innovation at Mozilla, she created and
incubated the Rally project, a privacy-preserving data platform
leveraged by institutions including Princeton, Stanford, and The Markup
to conduct research in the public interest. Before that, she founded the
Firefox Data Science team and advanced Lean Data Practices as Mozilla’s
director of data science.
Weiss has held fellowships at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet
and Society at Harvard University and at the Brown Institute for Media
Innovation (a joint effort between Stanford School of Engineering and
Columbia School of Journalism). She has advised the U.S. Congress on
artificial intelligence policy and her research has been published in
leading computer science and social science conferences and journals,
such as WWW, ICWSM, KDD, PETS, and ICA. She holds a Ph.D. from
Stanford, a S.M. in technology policy from MIT, and a B.A. in cognitive
systems from the University of British Columbia.