Digifesto

Some years ago I entered a PhD program with the intention to become a Scientist. I had some funny ideas about what this meant that were more informed by reading philosophy than by scientific practice. By Science, I was thinking of something more like the German Wissenschaft than what are by and large more narrowly circumscribed institutions that are dominant in the United States today. I did, and still do, believe in, the pursuit of knowledge through rigorous inquiry.

Last week I attended the Principal Investigator (PI) meetings for the “Designing Accountable Software Systems” (DASS) program of the National Science Foundation. Attending those meetings, I at last felt like I made it. I am a scientist! Also in attendance were a host of colleagues whom I respect, with a shared interest in how to make “software systems” (a good name for the ubiquitous “digital” infrastructure that pervades everything now) more accountable to law and social norms. There were a bunch of computer scientists, but also many law professors, and some social scientists as well. What we were doing there was coming up with ideas for what the next project call under this program should be about. It was an open discussion about the problems in the world, and the role of science in fixing them. There’s a real possibility that these conversations will steer the future of research funding and in a small way nudge the future forward. Glorious.

In the past year, I’ve had a few professional developments that reinforce my feeling of being on the right track. A couple more of the grants I’ve applied to have landed. This has shifted my mindset about my work from one of scarcity (“Ack! What happens if I run out of funding!”) to one of abundance (“Ack! How am I going to hire somebody who I can pay with this funding!”). People often refer to academic careers as “precarious” up until one gets a tenure-track job, or even tenure. I’ve felt that precariousness in my own career. I still feel lower on the academic totem poll because I haven’t found a tenure track job as a professor, or a well-remunerated industrial research lab job. So I don’t take my current surplus for granted, and am well aware of all the talent swirling around that is thirsty for opportunities. But what people say is that it’s hard to get your first grant, and that it gets easier after that. There are full-time “soft money” researchers in my network who are career inspirations.

Another development is that I’ve been granted Principal Investigator status at New York University School of Law, which means I can officially manage my own grants there without a professor technically signing off or supervising the work. This is a tremendous gift of independence from Dr. Katherine Strandburg, my long-time mentor and supervisor at NYU’s Information Law Institute, where I’ve been affiliated for many years. It would be impossible to overstate Dr. Strandburg’s gentle and supportive influence on my postdoctoral work. I have been so fortunate to work with such a brilliant, nimble, open-minded, and sincerely good professor for the years I have been at NYU, both in direct collaboration and at the Information Law Institute, which, in her image, is an endless source of joyful intellectual stimulation.

Law schools are a funny place to do scientific research. They are naturally interdisciplinary in terms of scholarship — law professors work in many social scientific and technical disciplines, besides their own discipline of law. They are funded primarily by law student tuition, and so they are in many ways a professional school. But law is an inherently normative field — laws are norms — and so the question of how to design systems according to ethics and justice is part of the trade. Today, with the ubiquity of “software systems” — the Internet, “Big Data” a decade ago, “AI” today — the need for a rigorous science of sociotechnical systems is ever-present. Law schools are fine places to do that work.

However, law schools are often short on technical talent. Fortunately, I am also appointed at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), which is based in Berkeley, California, a non-profit lab that spun out of UC Berkeley’s (UCB) Computer Science department. I also have PI status at ICSI, and am running a couple of grants out of there at the moment.

Working as a remote PI for ICSI is a very funny “return” to Berkeley. I did my doctorate at UCB’s Information School but completed the work in New York, working with Helen Nissenbaum, who at the time was leaving NYU (and the Information Law Institute she co-founded with Kathy Strandburg) to start the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech. I never expected to come “back” to Berkeley, in no small part because I discovered in California that I am not, in fact, a Californian. But the remote appointment, at a place free from the university politics and bureaucracy that drive people over there crazy, fits just right. There are some computer science all-stars that did groundbreaking work still at ICSI to look up to, and a lot of researchers in my own generation who work on very related problems of technical accountability. It is a good place to do scientific work oriented towards objective evaluation and design of sociotechnical systems.

All this means that I feel that somehow, despite pursuing an aggressively — some would say foolishly — interdisciplinary path, I have a certain amount of security in my position as a scientist. This has been the product of luck and hard work and stubbornness and to some extent an inability to do anything else. How many times have I cursed my circumstances and decisions, with setback after setback and failure after failure? I’ve lost count. The hard truth facing anybody pursuing Wissenschaft in the 21st century is that knowledge is socially constructed, and that the pursuit of objective knowledge must be performed from a very carefully constructed social position. But they do exist.

What now? Well, I find that now that I am actually positioned to make progress on the research projects that I see as most dear, I am behind on all of them. Projects that were launched years ago still haven’t manifested. I am painfully aware, every day, of the gap between what I have set out to accomplish and what I can tell the world I’ve done. Collaborating with other talented, serious people can be hard work; sometimes personality, my own or others’, makes it harder. I look on my past publications and they seem like naive sketches towards something better. I present my current work to colleagues and sometimes they find it hard to understand. It is isolating. But I do understand that this is to some extent exactly how it must be, if I’m making real progress on my own agenda. I am very hopeful that my best work is ahead of me.