When: Third Friday of each month at 1 PM Central Time (sometimes fourth Friday; next workshop: Friday, March 20, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time).
What: First 90 minutes: Two presentations of CS+Law works in progress or new papers with open Q&A. Last 30 minutes: Networking.
Where: Zoom
Who: CS+Law faculty, postdocs, PhD students, and other students (1) enrolled in or who have completed a graduate degree in CS or Law and (2) engaged in CS+Law research intended for publication.
A Steering Committee of CS+Law faculty from Berkeley, Boston U., U. Chicago, Cornell, Georgetown, MIT, North Carolina Central, Northwestern, Ohio State, Penn, Technion, and UCLA organizes the CS+Law Monthly Workshop. A different university serves as the chair for each monthly program and sets the agenda.
Why: The Steering Committee’s goals include building community, facilitating the exchange of ideas, and getting students involved. To accomplish this, we ask that participants commit to attending regularly.
Computer Science + Law is a rapidly growing area. It is increasingly common that a researcher in one of these fields must interact with the other discipline. For example, there is significant research in each field regarding the law and regulation of computation, the use of computation in legal systems and governments, and the representation of law and legal reasoning. There has been a significant increase in interdisciplinary research collaborations between researchers from CS and Law. Our goal is to create a forum for the exchange of ideas in a collegial environment that promotes building community, collaboration, and research that helps to further develop CS+Law as a field.
Please join us for our next CS+Law Research Workshop online on Friday, March 20, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Chicago Time).
Workshop 37 Organizer: University of Pennsylvania (Christopher S. Yoo and Justin (Gus) Hurwitz)
Agenda:
20-minute presentation - Emma Lurie
10-minute discussion
20-minute presentation - Alex Mueller
10-minute discussion
30-minute open Q&A about both presentations
30-minute open discussion
Presentation 1: Evaluating the Epistemic Infrastructure of Government AI Disclosures
Presenter: Emma Lurie, Postdoctoral Researcher in Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania; Danaé Metaxa, Raj and Neera Singh Term Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania; and Sorelle Friedler, Raj and Neera Singh Term Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
Abstract:
Federal transparency infrastructure for AI exists but is fragmented across disclosure regimes, many of which were not designed with AI technology in mind. System of Records Notices, Paperwork Reduction Act documentation, AI Use Case Inventories, and procurement records each capture different aspects of risk and activate different oversight obligations, yet no single mechanism provides a complete picture of government AI use. This project relies on both computational and qualitative research methods to ask what federal transparency documents reveal and obscure about government AI use by analyzing these four disclosure regimes, using facial recognition technology as a primary empirical case study. The analysis treats transparency documents as sociotechnical artifacts that actively construct what is legible, who bears disclosure obligations, and which populations are made vulnerable by the AI systems. Findings show that agencies can satisfy all applicable disclosure requirements while keeping operationally significant AI systems invisible for months, as illustrated by Mobile Fortify, a facial recognition app deployed by ICE against U.S. citizens that did not appear in any transparency mechanism until nine months after its creation. The project contributes an empirical account of federal AI transparency and proposes deployment-based disclosure triggers.
Presentation 2: CISA as an Informational Regulator
Presenter: Alex Mueller, CTIC Academic Fellow
Abstract:
Cybersecurity information sharing has achieved something close to axiomatic status in federal cybersecurity discourse, as the prevailing assumption has long been that timely distribution of cyber threat intelligence can lead to substantially improved security outcomes. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is the primary institutional expression of this assumption, charged with facilitating the flow of cybersecurity threat intelligence among a broad network of federal, non-federal, and private sector actors. CISA is, at its core, an informational regulator: it uses the production and distribution of information as its primary regulatory tool. Although there is already a large body of literature on informational regulation, it focuses almost exclusively on public disclosure as a mechanism for generating accountability through markets, public pressure, or improved consumer decision-making.
I argue that CISA represents a distinct, undertheorized variant of informational regulation, one whose conditions for effectiveness differ from conventional mandated disclosure and whose mischaracterization may help explain some of CISA’s well-documented struggles. Unlike conventional disclosure regimes, CISA cannot simply compel the threat actors who possess superior information to make it public; instead, it must actively sense threats distributed across a fragmented and often unwilling information environment, process that raw intelligence into actionable products, and transmit those products to technical actors capable of translating them into defensive action. I thus draw on cybernetics—the study of information-driven control processes in systems of all kinds—to address what conventional theories of informational regulation cannot fully account for here. I then use this augmented framework to diagnose the conditions under which this variant of informational regulation succeeds or fails and to derive a prescriptive account of what effective institutional design requires, starting with CISA as the primary case.
Join our group to get the agenda and Zoom information for each meeting and engage in the CS+Law discussion.
Submit a proposed topic to present. We strongly encourage the presentation of works in progress, although we will consider the presentation of more polished and published projects.
Friday, September 20, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: Northwestern)
Friday, October 18, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: UC Berkeley)
Friday, November 15, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: University of Chicago)
Friday, January 17, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: UPenn)
Friday, February 21, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: Cornell)
Friday, March 21, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: Tel Aviv University + Harvard)
Friday, April 18, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: TBD)
Friday, May 16, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: Georgetown)
Ran Canetti (Boston U.)
Bryan Choi (Ohio State)
Aloni Cohen (U. Chicago)
April Dawson (North Carolina Central)
James Grimmelmann (Cornell Tech)
Jason Hartline (Northwestern)
Dan Linna (Northwestern)
Paul Ohm (Georgetown)
Pamela Samuelson (Berkeley)
Inbal Talgam-Cohen (Technion - Israel Institute of Technology)
John Villasenor (UCLA)
Rebecca Wexler (Berkeley)
Christopher Yoo (Penn)
Northwestern Professors Jason Hartline and Dan Linna convened an initial meeting of 21 CS+Law faculty at various universities on August 17, 2021 to propose a series of monthly CS+Law research conferences. Hartline and Linna sought volunteers to sit on a steering committee. Hartline, Linna, and their Northwestern colleagues provide the platform and administrative support for the series.