School of Information

Social protection programs are essential to assisting the poor, but governments and humanitarian agencies are rarely resourced to provide aid to all those in need, so accurate targeting of benefits is critical. In developed economies, targeting decisions typically rely on administrative income data or broad survey-based social registries. In low-income countries, however, poverty information is rarely reliable, comprehensive, or up-to-date. Novel sources of digital data — from mobile phones and satellites, in particular — are well suited to fill this gap: they are predictive of wealth in low-income contexts and ubiquitously collected. The research studies in this dissertation design and evaluate new methods for targeting aid in low-resource contexts using machine learning, satellite imagery, and mobile phone data, and evaluate these methods in large, real-world interventions. Across social protection programs in Togo, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh, the studies in this dissertation show that targeting methods based on machine learning and digital data sources identify poor households more accurately than methods based on categorical eligibility criteria like geography or occupation, but typically less accurately than traditional survey-based poverty measurement approaches. These results highlight the potential for digital data and machine learning to improve the targeting of humanitarian aid, particularly when traditional poverty data are unavailable or out-of-date and in settings where conflict, environmental conditions, or health concerns render primary data collection infeasible. These studies also provide empirical evidence on the limitations and risks of digital and algorithmic targeting approaches, including privacy, transparency, fairness, and digital exclusion. 

Instagram, with over 516 million (Forbes, 2024) users in India as of 2023, is significant in shaping the political opinions of young people. The platform's focus on visual content and social engagement has transformed it from a simple photo-sharing app into a powerful space for political expression and discussion. While this opens new avenues for political participation, it also raises concerns about misinformation, polarization, and its impact on mental health.

By focusing on lived experiences, this research seeks to uncover the criteria young people use to evaluate political content, the role Instagram plays in either bridging or widening political divides and the impact these interactions have on their mental health and personal relationships.

The paper will investigate the complexities involved in moderating casteist content on major social media platforms. Focusing on the challenges of categorizing hate speech targeting India's marginalized caste-oppressed minorities, the research aims to delve into the mechanisms utilized by platforms for content moderation. It will critically analyze existing categorization systems, exploring the efficacy and limitations in identifying and addressing casteist comments. By leveraging information sciences concepts like grounded coding and taxonomies, the study will elucidate the complexities of classifying caste-related hate speech within these systems. Moreover, it will highlight the implications of inadequate categorization on content visibility and community impact.

The internet's key points of global control lie in the hands of a few people, primarily private organizations based in the United States. These control points, as they exist today, raise structural risks to the global internet's long-term stability. I argue: the problem isn't that these control points exist, it's that there is no popular governance over them. I advocate for a localist approach to internet governance: small internets deployed on municipal scales, interoperating selectively, carefully, with this internet and one another.

Visual data exploration enables analysts to identify trends and patterns, generate and verify hypotheses, and detect outliers and anomalies. However, the overwhelming number of decisions required in visual data exploration presents a barrier to discovering useful, action-able insights from data. To address this challenge, in this dissertation, we investigate how automated assistance via tooling aids visual data exploration.We introduce four systems to survey the design space of visual exploration assistants across different analytical tasks and interface modalities. We first describe VisPilot and Zenvisage++, two novel visual exploration assistants that accelerate the data exploration process for individual visual analysis tasks: drill-down analysis and pattern search. Next, we examine visual exploration assistants aimed at supporting multiple types of visual analysis tasks. We introduce Frontier, a general-purpose visual exploration assistant within a GUI-based charting tool that recommends potential next steps in a mixed-initiative visual analysis workflow. We further develop Lux, a general-purpose visual exploration assistant situated within a computational notebook that provides proactive, always-on recommendations within an exploratory programming workflow. Findings from this dissertation contribute towards designing an intelligent visual exploration assistant that suggests helpful tailored feedback based on user’s analytical needs and seamlessly guides users towards data-driven insights.

Recognizing the prevalence of initiatives to align technology with social values through design and “by design” (such as privacy by design, security by design, and governance by design), this dissertation explores the current and potential role of design techniques in attending to values, and analyzes user experience (UX) professionals’ “values work” practices—practices used to surface, advocate for, and attend to values—within large technology companies.

            The first part of the dissertation interrogates the relationship between values and design practices, looking at privacy as a case study. A review of human computer interaction literature about privacy and design suggests the importance of thinking about the purpose of design, who does the work of design, and on whose behalf is design work done. In order to better understand how design in the service of “values work” could be used towards purposes of exploration, critique and speculation, I create a set of speculative design fictions depicting a range of fictional products that suggest different sets of privacy harms. These designs serve as way to surface and foster reflection on values. The success of this design intervention in a laboratory setting sparked interest in understanding whether and how design approaches were used in values work within the technology industry.

            The second part of the dissertation seeks to understand the practices and strategies of UX professionals who already see addressing values as a part of their practice. I conducted interviews with UX professionals working at large technology companies, and field observations at meetups in the San Francisco Bay Area about technology design and values. These UX professionals report doing values work as a part of everyday configurations of UX work, such as when designing interfaces or conducting user research. More strikingly, UX professionals also report on engaging in a range of other activities aimed at shaping the organization, rather than a technical product or system. These practices are used by UX professionals to re-configure how values work is conducted at their organizations in several ways: by making more space for UX professionals’ values work; by getting others in the organization to adopt human-centered perspectives on values; and by changing the politics and strategies of the organization regarding values. Moreover, UX professionals’ values work practices occur within relations and systems of power. UX professionals often engage in tactics of soft resistance, seeking to subtly subvert existing practices towards more values-conscious ends while maintaining legibility as conducting business-as-usual within the organization. Together, these values work practices create social and organizational infrastructures to promote an alternative sociotechnical imaginary of large technology companies in a way that views these companies and their workers as more cognizant, proactive, and responsible for identifying and addressing social values, in particular reducing harms to users and other stakeholders.

The last part of the dissertation reflects on the politics of using speculative design techniques in the service of values work. Experiences sharing speculative designs with others who interpreted the designs in ways that do not recognize their speculative, critical, and reflective nature, raises questions about how speculative design can be re-appropriated by or co-opted towards the very ends that are being critiqued and reflected upon. One approach to this dilemma might be to conduct speculative design work with and for specific groups of stakeholders, instead of for broad public discussion. Another approach might be to create organizational fictions that focus a designer’s and viewer’s attention more on practices and social relationships, compared to traditional speculative designs that focus attention on fictional products. Informed by the practices of UX professionals involved in values advocacy, the dissertation concludes by suggesting a new purpose for design, design for infrastructuring imaginaries, to complement the social practices of values advocacy. I reflect on the politics of choosing design as a mode of action when conducting values work, and reflect on implications that this work has for values in design researchers, practitioners, and stakeholders.