Syllabus Description: In this class, we will approach the study of ethics and computing and information science by grounding our conversations in readings from Anthony Weston’s, "A 21st Century Ethical Toolbox", 4th Edition. With Weston’s help, we will talk about values in this class, different kinds of values, and how to identify conflict based in competing values, as well as what our personal values are, and how the ways we apply them to different situations may be quite different from that of even our best friends and closest family members. We will work on understanding how to identify the competing values that may be at work when we face technology-based (or any other) dilemmas.

In the process, we will consider a number of broad themes that appear constantly these days in newspapers, magazines, podcasts, video uploads and films around the world. These themes include digital deception and mis- and dis-information; the uses, abuses, and hidden assumptions of AI including algorithmic bias; the uses and abuses of social media; and concerns with privacy and community across all these technologies. The impact of our cognitive and social biases on the design, application, and policies surrounding digital technologies will anchor our conversations throughout the course, as will weekly guest lectures from researchers working on all these areas of interest. And we will take a circular approach to all these topics, revisiting each one nearly every week, as we build our understanding of some of the core ethical conflicts and your individual, personal concerns with them that may be associated with their uses.

Upon completion of this course, students should be able to: 1) identify different values and kinds of values that may play a role in specific ethical concerns and dilemmas, 2) better describe their personal ethics and the values that are most and least important to them, 3) better engage in an ethics-based analysis and discussion of a variety of contemporary digital technologies.

Syllabus Description: ACI is a new field of applied research on the cusp of explosive growth. It is of acute interest to professionals working in captive animal management and the commercial pet and agricultural industries as well as those working in the fields of assistive and therapeutic animals, wildlife conservation, and scientific research especially within the cognitive, biological, and evolutionary sciences.
This exploratory seminar will serve as an introduction to ACI. My goal is to spark your ACI imaginations! Together, we will draw on faculty and student-selected readings, multimedia materials, and guest lectures from current ACI designers/researchers/practitioners to see what we think about the ethics, history, state-of-the-art, and possible futures for this broad field of practice.
We will focus on five emerging areas:

Maker applications for animals, providing 1) unique “enrichment” opportunities for their “users,” such as the San Francisco Zoo’s Rhino Foobler – a giant hard plastic ball with six internal chambers that can be filled with food and programmed to dispense throughout the day when the rhino pushes it around -- developed with the entrepreneurs who invented the commercially successful Foobler for dogs; 2) more species-appropriate interfaces for animals who provide assistance to disabled humans, such as dog nose-friendly light switches and telephone buttons; and 3) assistive technology to animals, themselves, such as 3D-printed replacement limbs, or animal-activated hydration (e.g., iguana) or massage (e.g., cow) stations.
Automated quality of life data capture and analysis for captive animal health and wellness, whether for livestock, zoo elephants, shelter dogs awaiting adoption, or, for example, IU Informatics alum Ellie Symes’s use of data science to monitor hives for The Bee Corp.

Wildlife tracking and monitoring (now including the ability to detect and locate poachers as well), whether the movements of deer in Bloomington; diseased, disease-spreading, or endangered species in Indiana; the dispersal of invasive species in the Great Lakes, or the diurnal and migration patterns of animals living throughout the world, these technologies cover a wide range of devices and techniques, including literally light-as-a-feather sensor design and data capture, the deployment and analysis of video data from drones, still and moving image capture and analysis (possibly from social media), and more.

Animal cognition—As Indy Zoo Research Scientist Chris Martin puts it, we are now able to learn far more about how nonhuman animals think and feel, while asking them to do far less in order for us to do so. Eye tracking software, interactive games, problem-solving puzzles, and environmental choice options all provide voluntary opportunities for animals to participate in noninvasive situations that help us better understand them in kinder, more ethical ways.

Interspecies Relationships and Education —Stunning exhibit design; novel approaches to data collection, analysis, and visualization; simulations and immersive experiences; even the translation of other species’ multisensory forms of communication—technological innovation can help us understand animals and improve our interactions with them in remarkable ways.

‘Good to Great’ – Luddy’s Article Writing for PhDs course sets up students for success

Syllabus Description: Welcome to this wonderful, challenging course on article writing for PhD students! This class follows the process outlined in Wendy Belcher’s Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks (2nd ed, U Chicago Press 2019). Students begin the course with two things in hand: this book, and a paper they would like to revise and submit for publication. Ideally, the paper could be something already submitted and either rejected or in a state of “revise and resubmit”. However, it also could be a paper written for a class, a draft of an intended publication in progress, or even a detailed outline waiting to be fleshed out.

By the end of the course, you should have a completed paper ready to submit for publication, a full draft of a paper well on its way to its final form, or, at the very least, a very, very good idea of exactly what you have left to do in order to finish. It all depends on how far along your paper is when we start the class, and how much time you can put into the process each week.

This course does not focus on “writing” in terms of grammar, punctuation, or spelling, etc. Belcher does not even ask us to look at these until almost the end of our process. Rather, this course focuses on understanding the structure of an article – and your specific argument. We focus on the expectations underlying each part of this scholarly object: the abstract, thesis, claims of significance, literature review, methods, findings, and discussion. We also focus on super practical, checklist-style ways to just get the work done. It’s all about learning to see conference papers and journal articles as just another genre of literature that can be broken down, understood, and mastered, one step at a time.

In addition to thinking about our writing and learning to write every day (even if it’s just 15 minutes) we will read quite a bit. It’s essential that we immerse ourselves in the journals and literature of our field in this course. This is how we discern the current conversations in our field, where those conversations are happening, and what our unique contributions might be to those conversations. In fact, as we learn the craft of helpful peer review, in this course you can expect to learn a great deal about the conversations happening across the many fields that intersect in the field of informatics.

In other words, this seminar is an introduction to the complex world of academic publishing and is designed to give writers in a variety of disciplines practical experience in getting their work published in peer-reviewed journals. Using Wendy Laura Belcher’s Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success, we will explore the publication process and share strategies for achieving success in the academic writing arena. We will discuss actions items such as how to set up a work schedule, identify appropriate journals for submission, work with editors, write query letters, clarify arguments, make claims of significance, provide helpful peer review, and respond to editors’ comments. The goal of this course is to help us learn how to take our papers from classroom quality to journal quality and, in a supportive environment, help overcome anxiety about academic publishing. The class meets for 2-1/2 hours once a week.

Syllabus Description: This course provides students with an opportunity to acquire better fieldwork skills by providing a forum for practicing and discussing the craft of direct observation-based fieldwork. Students who complete the course will have acquired a failsafe starting point for the collection of ethnographic data as well as an understanding of the importance of a clear conceptual agenda in the field. They will have learned to better analytically separate what is observed from assumptions about what the observations mean and to better re-present their observations and analysis of them to others. All of this will be achieved through practice and constant feedback on student written materials as well as discussions of events experienced while in the field. Students will have learned much about their own thought process particularly through analysis of their field notes. Finally, students will have demonstrated the key principle of human-centered (better, primate-centered) design as they show the connection between basic observational research and the design concepts that result from that research.

The course is designed like a studio or fine arts class. Students will complete assigned readings prior to each class. At the start of class, students will turn in the current assignment then we will return and discuss the previous one. We will spend quite a bit of time each class looking at each others’ field notes as well as discussing the reports based on them. We will then discuss the particular concept and technical problem at the heart of the new assignment for the day. Students will immediately commence with that exercise, responding to the assignment in whatever way seems most suitable while observing orangutans in their habitat. Students will keep extensive data journals, write weekly (succinct) observation reports, and produce a final project based on the semester’s fieldwork.

The final project for this course requires students to design a toy, tool, training device, schedule, environment, or environmental feature for the social unit studied, including an extensive data analysis that justifies the design. (Students may present design concepts to be used by humans if they can show how it would directly benefit the orangutans, themselves, based on the orangutans’ behavior.) Students will present these design concepts in two parts, each consisting of a ten-minute presentation. Zoo staff may be present. The first presentation should focus on the data, how it led to the proposed design, and include a critique of the likely sources of inaccuracy in that data that might lead to the proposed design being faulty.

After this preliminary work, we will focus on developing a plan for how one might define and test the proposed design’s success. A second presentation of this work will pay special attention to analyzing the potential impact of the design on the organizational stakeholders and the social unit’s relationships and interaction patterns. The brief students produce at the end of the course will include not only the student’s design concepts and rationale but also this careful analysis of one’s expectations should the design be implemented.