The Automated Society Working Group

Research interests

Our research interests cover a range of exciting new technologies:

• Smart cities – technologically-enhanced urban environments, internet-linked services and spaces, built for citizens and built for fairness
• Autonomous Intelligences – driverless cars, automatic safety services, risk-mitigation strategies, intelligent agents and interfaces, and responsive tracking systems
• Machine learning – the creation and training of machine intelligence, purposive and appropriate learning systems for creative and pragmatic ends, awareness of biases and risks
• Big Data – big social data: its collection, storage, and use in Australia and internationally
• VR, AR, and 3D printing – digital worlds as mapped on to reality, reality mapped into digital worlds, and printing out digital objects as physical artefacts
• Sensors and biometrics – driverless cars, automatic safety services, risk-mitigation strategies, intelligent agents and interfaces, and responsive tracking systems
• Automated decision-making – robot lawyers, employment tools, navigation systems, and recommendation services.

Research agendas

Our research agendas address a range of specific concerns about how the automated society could work best for people. These are lens that we consider to be crucial for developing the best possible outcomes for public, private, and civil society into the future.

• Access and empowerment – Ensuring that automation is implemented in a way that empowers people, with emphasis on equitable and affordable access as automation could greatly improve our lives as a public good and commercial service.
• Egalitarian social values – Prioritising technology that improves people’s lives; reduces the capacity for automated harassment, abuse, or targeting based on individual or group characteristics; and work to distribute the benefits of technological empowerment as equitably as possible.
• Built humanity – Privacy, safety, wellbeing, trust, and society taking a priority in any analysis.
• Policy for people – Working to ensure that the policy, regulation, and responsibility are managed in the best interest of the public.
• Automation literacy – Aiding the education of the public in the use and knowledge of automated systems, in particular in terms of application and the consequences of inclusion and exclusion within diverse types of automated systems.
• Digital ethics – Providing commentary and insight into the how our practices with new technology will integrate with existing social expectations and standards, as well as moral expectations and ‘doing good’.
• Alternative values – Thinking about forms of human value other than monetary systems, for instance health, well-being, and inclusion.
• Future-facing – Ensuring that implemented systems are properly safeguarded against future developments in technology and society, and that public expectations are properly managed.

Professor Mark Andrejevic

Professor of Digital Media Studies

Professor Andrejevic researches the social and cultural aspects of digital media technologies, with a particular emphasis on automated data collection and decision-making. His work explores the intersection of popular culture, surveillance, and media technology. He is the author of three monographs, more than 70 journal articles and book chapters, and co-edited two books.

Dr Luzhou (Nina) Li

Lecturer in Media Industry Studies

Dr. Li's work focuses on digital culture, global media and cultural industries, media history and political economy, television studies, Chinese media, among others. Her recent project examines how online video emerged as an alternative cultural institution to television in China and its consequences for cultural politics and global communication.

Dr Verity Trott

Lecturer in Digital Media Research (Methods and Tools)

Dr. Trott’s research combines big data analytics with an ethnographic approach to examine the political, cultural and social dimensions of digital technologies from an intersectional and feminist standpoint. Her recent research explores digital feminist activism and expressions of masculinity online.

Dr Robbie Fordyce

Lecturer in Big Data, Quantitative Analytics, and Research Methods

Dr. Fordyce’s work is focused on the use of digital media technologies by the general public, examining what barriers, concerns, and risks people encounter with new technology, and how these technologies can empower or enhances our everyday lives.