Conference Recap: Police Symposium on New Technologies

After the recent wave of calls for highly interesting events, it's about time for some original stuff! So here's a brief recap of a conference I attended last week - and this one was in fact quite different from the regular academic experience, which makes it all the more interesting. The federal law enforcement agencies of Germany, Switzerland and Austria, as well as the "Landespolizei" of Bavaria organized a tri-national conference on "new technologies" which was held in the VIP lounge of the Berne hockey stadium. This year was in fact the 4th edition of the event, setting the scope on ubiquitous computing (find the agenda here). But of course it was all about Big Data - surprise!

CFP: The politics of surveillance

Here's an interesting workshop in Canada for surveillance studies focusing on activism. This might be a good opportunity for STS/surveillance scholars working on public engagement issues. There also seems to be an opportunity to publish a paper.

4S - 2014 edition

 And it goes on... "The king is dead, long live the king!" Or rather: just as 4S has come off the calendar for 2013, 4S is back on for 2014. Here's the full announcement for Buenos Aires:

4S Annual Meeting - a "surveillance review"

It's been a couple weeks now since the 2013 edition of the 4S Annual Meeting took place in San Diego. Time for a quick guest author's review! The event has been the largest conference organized by the Society for Social Studies of Science so far, assembling over 1.200 attendees in the "Town and Country Resort and Convention Center", and providing the convenient possibility to relax by the pool under palm trees between the sessions.

4S recap

We've been back from 4S for a while now and I think it's time for a little recap of some of the surveillance relevant sessions -- and there were quite a few! Let's say, big data was really BIG this time; it was present even in sessions which didn't have the magic words in the title. It was pretty amazing. Matthias will guest blog about the surveillance panels (yay!), and I'll try to talk a little about the algorithms stuff (which also was about big data) (man, big data! it's everywhere!).

Faceless @ MuseumsQuartier, Vienna

The MuseumsQuartier in Vienna hosts an exhibition which deals with the desire to become faceless in a world which demands our visibility. It shows how works in art, fashion, photography, and advertisment have picked up on that desire to be anonymous - in ways that made me smile, too. Looking at the exhibition website, it really seems like a thoughtfully curated collection which approaches the subject from various angles. (Here's also a brochure with more info)

Lucy Suchman talks about drones @ WZB

Lucy Suchman will talk about her work in progress, which is about drones, on May 22nd at the WZB, Berlin. Exiting stuff! Everyone's welcome, but they ask for registration to help them plan. I'll definitely go (and talk about it here later). Check out the abstract: