Algorithmic Accountability, Part II

In total this project produced three book chapters, two conference papers, an academic journal article, and a magazine article. The authors also wrote a total of 16 articles for various forms of news media including blogs as well as outlets like the Washington Post, Slate, and MIT Technology Review. Seven workshops were taught relating to the topics of the subawards including workshops related to investigating algorithms and designing news bots. Twenty-seven public presentations were given as part of the subaward, including keynotes to investigative journalists in Europe and Canada, as well as numerous panels and talks discussing algorithmic accountability and transparency. Five open source repositories were published. 

The authors built and launched algorithmtips.org, which is a database of leads, as well as a community resource for journalists interested in beginning to investigate algorithms. The site attracts almost 1000 visitors per month (with high site engagement as people are looking through the database), and has attracted a handful of dedicated volunteers who are helping to expand the coverage of the database. The authors published a research paper at the Computation + Journalism Symposium in 2017 detailing how they built the database and laying out their plans for scaling up the efforts. 

Diakopoulos' work relating to the ethics of algorithms was influential in crafting the Association for Computing Machinery's ethics guide relating to algorithmic transparency and accountability, which has since been adopted in Europe as well. 

Project lead: Nicholas Diakopoulos