Jan 25, 2017
Can liberty survive the digital age? In this episode, Princeton
University professors Jennifer Rexford and Janet Vertesi discuss
internet infrastructure and its effect on how people use the web as
a vehicle for communication and information. This episode is
part of a series featuring panelists who will participate in
the Princeton-Fung Global Forum: “Society 3.0+: Can Liberty
Survive the Digital Age?” The conference, to be held March 20-21 in
Berlin, is being organized by the Woodrow Wilson School of
Public and International Affairs. Jennifer Rexford is the
Gordon Y.S. Wu Professor of Engineering, professor of computer
science and chair of the Department of Computer Science at
Princeton University. Before joining Princeton in 2005, she
worked for eight years at AT&T Labs—Research. Jennifer
received her bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from
Princeton University in 1991 and her Ph.D. degree in electrical
engineering and computer science from the University of Michigan in
1996. She is co-author of the book "Web Protocols and Practice"
(Addison-Wesley, May 2001). She served as the chair of ACM SIGCOMM
from 2003 to 2007. Jennifer was the 2004 winner of ACM's Grace
Murray Hopper Award for outstanding young computer
professional. She is an ACM fellow (2008) and a member of
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2013) and the National
Academy of Engineering (2014). Janet Vertesi is
a sociologist of science and technology at Princeton
University, where she is an assistant professor in the
Department of Sociology. At Princeton, she
teaches classes on the sociology of science and
technology, technology in organizations and human-computer
interaction. Vertesi has spent the past decade as an ethnographer
of spacecraft missions at NASA, and is the author of "Seeing Like a
Rover: How Robots, Teams and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars." In
addition to her research on complex technical organizations,
she nurtures a passion for public understanding about the
intersection of technology and society, especially with respect to
online privacy. Best known publicly for her “opt out”
experiments that reveal underlying assumptions embedded in
computing technologies, she is an advisory board member of the Data
& Society Institute in New York City, has blogged extensively on
the topic at Time.com and is a faculty affiliate of the Center for
Information Technology Policy.