Organized by the Center for Global Policy Solutions, this three-day summit will address pathways to greater economic opportunity through the lens of “Technology, Inclusion, and Social Change.”  Approximately 300 policymakers, journalists, advocates, and experts at the intersection of government, technology, economics, education, health, and human and civil rights will discuss and advance solutions to today’s biggest societal changes. Sessions will explore the impact of the latest technological advancements in big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. It will also feature the “Inclusion Revolution Innovation Competition” that will award a $10,000 prize to innovators who develop products, services, programs, or policies that help make the application of technology, big data, and/or the operation of the tech sector more inclusive and economically and socially beneficial to marginalized communities.

The Program on Economics & Privacy (PEP) at George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School will host a Scholars Conference on the economics of digital information policy on Friday, April 28, 2017. The mission of PEP is to promote the sound application of economic analysis to issues surrounding the digital information economy through original research, policy outreach, and education.

The Scholars Conference will showcase fourteen original law & economics research papers on such topics as:

• James Cooper (Director, PEP) on Measuring Autonomy Losses from the 2012 Google Privacy Policy Changes
• Martina Ferracane (European Centre for Intl Political Economy) on Stricter Regimes of Data Flows
• Mark Flood (US Treasury Office of Financial Research) on Cryptography and the Economics of Supervisory Information
• Jon Klick (U of Pennsylvania Law) on State Data Breaches and Income Tax e-Filing
• Meiping Sun (Columbia) on EMV Technology and Credit Card Fraud
• Jose Tudon (U of Chicago) on an Empirical Investigation on Net Neutrality

The Conference will also feature a luncheon keynote from Ginger Jin, Director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Economics.

A full list of speakers is available on the PEP website here.

Abstract:
Explanation has long been deemed a crucial aspect of accountability.  By requiring that powerful actors explain the bases of their decisions — the logic goes — we reduce the risks of error, abuse, and arbitrariness, thus producing more socially desirable decisions.  Decisionmaking processes employing machine learning algorithms and similar data-driven approaches complicate this equation.  Such approaches promise to refine and improve the accuracy and efficiency of decisionmaking processes, but the logic and rationale behind each decision remains opaque to human understanding.  The conference will grapple with the question of when and to what extent decisionmakers should be legally or ethically obligated to provide humanly meaningful explanations of individual decisions to those who are affected or to society at large.

List of Speakers:
Julius Adebayo, FastForward Labs
Guruduth Banavar, IBM Watson Lab
Solon Barocas, Microsoft Research
Enrico Bertini, NYU (Engineering)
Kiel Brennan-Marquez, NYU (Law)
Julie Brill, Hogan Lovells
Jim Burch, Police Foundation
Jenna Burrell, UC Berkeley (Information)
Federico Cabitza, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca (Italy)
Rich Caruana, Cornell (CS)
Alexandra Chouldechova, Carnegie Mellon (CS)
Anupam Datta, Carnegie Mellon (CS)
Deven Desai, Georgia Tech (Law)
Nick Diakopoulos, University of Maryland (Journalism)
Brad Greenberg, Yale ISP (Law)
Krishna Gummadi, MPI-SWS (Germany)
Jeremy Heffner, Hunchlab
Alison Howard, Microsoft
Zachary Lipton, UCSD (Biomedical Informatics)
Gilad Lotan, Buzzfeed
Frank Pasquale, University of Maryland (Law)
Foster Provost, NYU (Stern)
Dan Raviv, Lendbuzz
Aaron Rieke, Upturn
Paul Rifelj, Wisconsin Public Defenders
Andrea Roth, UC Berkeley (Law)
Andrew Selbst, Information Society Project
Kevin Stack, Vanderbilt (Law)
Katherine Strandburg, NYU (Law)
Jer Thorpe, Office for Creative Research
Sandra Wachter – Alan Turing Institute
Duncan Watts, Microsoft Research

By VRM Day and IIW (which follows over the next three days at the same location), we should have terms individuals can assert as first parties in dealings with others—especially companies—in the world. These terms, at the very least, can provide personal privacy protections, especially regarding collection and use of personal data.

This is new, and huge. It may also be the most leveraged thing ever to come out of ProjectVRM.

Background. Ever since industry won the Industrial Revolution, individuals have been subordinate second parties when dealing with large companies, especially in mass markets. When we click “accept” to those companies’ terms, we are always second parties. But now we will have first person terms of our own that companies can accept as second parties. These terms will live at Customer Commons, much as personal copyright terms now live at Creative Commons. (In fact Customer Commons is modeled after Creative Commons, which also came out of the Berkman (now Berkman Klein) Center.

Until now the timing hasn’t been right, because there were always too many reasons for companies to say no. But now the timing is right, thanks to new privacy protecting regulations, especially the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in the EU. Punishments to companies not complying with the GDPR are very nasty. Accepting friendly but privacy-protecting terms individuals assert can make companies GDPR compliant, and do it simply, easily and automatically. This will be especially good news to the compliance offices at large international companies. It will also be good for business, because it will involve better signaling of good will and commercial intentions by customers, while saving companies the expense of purely speculative (and soon illegal) spying-based adtech.

These terms can be accepted (or not) automatically by CRM systems. This was demonstrated using the JLINC protocol and a Salesforce CRM system at the last VRM Day. At this VRM Day we want to discuss both developed and possible terms, the technologies required to advance, accept, record and retrieve them, and ways to grow Customer Commons as well.

As always, VRM Day will also be prep for the next three days at IIW, where we can dig down a lot farther and start fostering or developing supportive code. VRM Day is free. IIW is cheap as conferences go. (You won’t find a conference as leveraged, period. Or one as cheap for three solid and productive days of real work—and good food.) Register for VRM Day here, and for IIW here.