Past Events › Panels & Seminars

Join award-winning tech reporter Cyrus Farivar for a book launch of Habeas Data: Privacy vs. the Rise of Surveillance Tech. Farivar will be joined by Alex Abdo, Litigation Director for the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, who will respond to the book and moderate conversation on the topic of data and privacy. You are being watched. Whether through your phone or your car or your credit card, caught on a CCTV camera or tracked through your online viewing…

Brown welcomes technology journalist Kara Swisher, co-founder of Recode and a contributing writer to The New York Times Opinion Section. She previously wrote for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, and served as co-executive editor of All Things Digital. Kara will discuss the state of the technology industry and will share her perspective on media trends with Brown Director Maneesh Agrawala. Thursday, May 2, 20196:30 pmMcCaw Hall, Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center 326 Galvez St, Stanford, CA 94305 Registration link: https://stanforduniversity.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_4Hp4pVNx0oE0KkR

Talk and discussion with Dr. Jonelle Bradshaw de Hernandez, Ph.D. Executive Director of Foundation Relations and researcher at The University of Texas at Austin. Technical skills are paramount to succeed in the modern labor market – but the question remains, what are the attributes and skills needed to make an impact on the social good? Who determines this and who decides and how does this impact vulnerable students in the U.S.? My first aim is to examine how well our…

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Charts, infographics, and diagrams are ubiquitous. They are useful because they can reveal patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. Good charts make us smarter—if we know how to read them. However, they can also deceive us. Charts lie in a variety of ways—displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty—…

The Brown Institute is excited to welcome Sean Rameswaram, host of Today, Explained, Vox’s daily explainer podcast. As advertised by Vox, Today, Explained is your all killer, no filler, Monday to Friday news. Sean, a veteran of the podcast space, will discuss Vox’s novel approach to their daily show and will join Brown Institute Director Maneesh Agrawala in conversation about the state of podcasts. Before joining Vox to host its daily news podcast, Sean was a correspondent for Radiolab's More…

Can climate fiction help overcome political friction? When climate change is the focus of both fiction and nonfiction, dystopia tends to rule. It’s not hard to see why, given that 30 years of efforts to push past fossil fuels have barely shifted the global energy mix and impacts on humans and nature mount as vulnerable communities encounter off-the-charts climate extremes. A notable exception is the prize-winning work of Kim Stanley Robinson, one of the planet’s most lauded living novelists of…

Each year, the Brown Institute sponsors talks that explore the intersection between media and technology. This year we have three virtual presentations lined up, each challenging us to think about data and computation in new ways. Each talk is by researchers outside of journalism, and yet we have a great deal to learn from their approaches to data and computation. Local Time: A Challenge for Visualization Register The term “local” usually suggests a specific geographical spot, but it also has…