BERKMAN CENTER FOR INTERNET & SOCIETY AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Upcoming events and digital media // October 27, 2010

[TUESDAY 11/2] Berkman Center Luncheon Series: "The Online Laboratory: Taking Experimental Social Science onto the Internet" with Dave Rand, Berkman Fellow & Research Scientist at Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2010/11/rand)

[THURSDAY 11/4] "The Cablevision Case - 2 Years Later: A Conversation About Copyright, Content, and the Cloud" with R. David Hosp, Goodwin Procter LLP & Ed Weiss, New England Sports Ventures (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2010/11/cablevision)

Special announcement: The Berkman Center is currently accepting fellowship applications for our 2011-2012 academic fellowship and through our annual open call for applications.  Please click here to learn more about Berkman's fellowship program..

CRCS Seminars

[MONDAY 11/1] CRCS Seminar: "Privacy Integrated Queries: A Programming Language for Differentially-Private Computation" with Frank McSherry, Microsoft Research Silicon Valley (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/6407)


[TUESDAY] BERKMAN LUNCHEON SERIES on THE ONLINE LABORATORY
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11/2/10, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center Conference Room @ 23 Everett St., Cambridge, MA
RSVP is required for those attending in person to Amar Ashar (ashar@cyber.law.harvard.edu)
This event will be webcast live

Topic: The Online Laboratory: Taking Experimental Social Science onto the Internet
Guests: Dave Rand, Berkman Fellow & Research Scientist at Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics

The internet provides an unprecedented opportunity for social scientists to recruit large number of subjects quickly, cheaply and virtually effortlessly. Online labor markets, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), allow researchers to easily recruit and pay subjects from around the world to participate in studies which are monetarily incentivized (ie pay depends on choices in the study, rather just a flat rate). These labor markets also facilitate field studies, where 'subjects' are unaware they are in an experiment, but instead think they are just completing normal work tasks. The speed and easy of online experimentation has the potential to increase the rate of scientific progress by orders of magnitude. In this talk Dave will describe how we go about designing and running experiments using MTurk, some successful experiments we have had (mostly involving cooperative social dilemmas), and the lessons we have learned thus far.

About Dave

Dave Rand is a Cooperation Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, as well as a Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics and a FQEB Prize Fellow in the Psychology Department. Dave's work focuses on the evolution of human behavior, with a particular emphasis on cooperation, generosity and altruism. His approach combines (i) empirical observations from behavioral experiments with (ii) predictions generated by evolutionary game theoretic math models and computer simulations. David's research has been published in Science, Nature and PNAS, and featured on NPR's All Things Considered and Earth & Sky as well as in a range of print media.

This event will be webcast live; for more information and a complete description, see the event web page: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2010/11/rand


[THURSDAY] THE CABLEVISION CASE - 2 YEARS LATER
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11/4/10, 12:00PM, Harvard Law School, Pound Hall Room 102
Presented by the Cyberlaw Clinic at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Harvard Law School's Journal of Law and Technology

Topic: The Cablevision Case - 2 Years Later: A Conversation About Copyright, Content, and the Cloud
Guests: R. David Hosp, Goodwin Procter LLP & Ed Weiss, New England Sports Ventures

The Second Circuit’s decision in  Cartoon Network v. CSC Holdings, 536 F.3d 121 (2008) – known as the “Cablevision” case – stands as the leading federal court decision to address copyright issues in the context of cloud-based content storage systems.  The decision validated Cablevision’s proposed “Remote Storage” DVR system, which allowed cable subscribers to record TV programs to centralized digital video recorders (as opposed to individual DVR boxes in their homes).  Reversing a lower court decision that found in favor of plaintiff content owners and ruled Cablevision’s proposed RS-DVR to be infringing, the Court of Appeals held such a system “would not directly infringe plaintiffs’ exclusive rights to reproduce and publicly perform their copyrighted works.”

Attorneys David Hosp and Ed Weiss offer unique perspectives on the Cablevision case.  As experts with extensive copyright experience, they can share their wealth of substantive knowledge on the complex issues addressed by the lower and appellate courts.  As advocates who were directly involved in the matter – David’s having represented Cablevision and Ed’s having served as in-house counsel for Time Warner at the time of the dispute – they can provide insight into the legal strategies, procedural twists and turns, and business considerations at the heart of the conflict.  Christopher Bavitz, Clinical Fellow at the Berkman Center and Assistant Director of the Cyberlaw Clinic, will moderate what promises to be an exciting and illuminating conversation about this landmark case.

For more information and a complete description, see the event web page: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2010/11/cablevision


CRCS Seminar: Privacy Integrated Queries: A Programming Language for Differentially-Private Computation
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CRCS Lunch Seminar
Date: Monday, November 1, 2010
Time: 11:30am – 1:00pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 119

Speaker: Frank McSherry, Microsoft Research Silicon Valley
Title: Privacy Integrated Queries: A Programming Language for Differentially-Private Computation

Abstract: Large volumes of sensitive data are currently collected by an array of agencies, companies, and other organizations. While these data clearly hold great potential for analysis, they can also reflect sensitive information about their participants. Scientists have struggled with the tension between extracting valuable statistical information from these datasets without accidentally disclosing specifics of individual records.

A recent privacy criterion, differential privacy, formally constrains the disclosure of specifics of individual records, without precluding the release of statistical information. Differential privacy requires that the outcome of a computation be almost as likely with and without any one record; to each participant, the analysis behaves as if it did not have access to the participant’s data.

While differential privacy is very strong, its use to date has been restricted to privacy experts; a small collection of highly-trained individuals who, no matter how motivated, are not able to satisfy the enormous volume of the world’s data analysis needs. To this end, we have assembled a programming language in which any program provides differential privacy, without requiring an expert privacy analysis. The language is almost identical to LINQ, a SQL-like extension to C#, and is readily useable by analysts with only a modest background in programming. We will discuss the design, implementation, and application of this language across a variety of data analysis contexts.

For more information and a complete description, see the event web page: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/6407


OTHER EVENTS OF NOTE
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10/27: "From Free Software and Wikipedia to a Field of Cooperative Human Systems Design" featuring Berkman Center Faculty Co-Director Yochai Benkler // University of Wisconsin (http://www.ocr.wisc.edu/calendar/?ID=32414)

10/27: "What Does it Mean to Be Connected in the 21st Century?" A talk with artist, filmmaker, and founder of the Webby Awards, Tiffany Shlain // IBM Research Center for Social Software, Cambridge (http://c4sstiffanyshlain.eventbrite.com/)

10/28: "Freedom and Power in the Networked Information Environment" featuring Berkman Center Faculty Co-Director Yochai Benkler // University of Wisconsin (http://www.ocr.wisc.edu/calendar/?ID=32418)

10/28-31: Free/Libre Culture Forum // Barcelona, Spain (http://2010.fcforum.net/)

10/29: "Why Books" Conference featuring Berkman Faculty Co-Directors John Palfrey and Stuart Shieber // Radcliffe (http://www.radcliffe.edu/events/whybooks_conference.aspx)

10/29: Privacy and Innovation Symposium // Yale Law School (http://www.law.yale.edu/intellectuallife/Privacy%20Symposium.htm)

10/29: Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy // Boston University (http://www.bu.edu/dioa/2010/10/21/planned-obsolescence/)

11/3-5: Mozilla Drumbeat Festival // Barcelona, Spain (http://www.drumbeat.org/festival)

11/4: "Civic Media and the Law" featuring Berkman Fellow and Citizen Media Law Project Director David Ardia // MIT Communications Forum (http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/forums/civic_media_law.html)

11/5: "The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires" book talk with Tim Wu // Harvard Book Store (http://www.harvard.com/events/press_release.php?id=2656)

11/30: One Day Conference - Big Data: Public Policy and the Exploding Digital Corpus // Princeton CITP (http://citp.princeton.edu/events/big-data/)


DIGITAL MEDIA: Watch and Listen
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Did you miss this week's luncheon talk? Catch up with Berkman videos, podcasts, pictures, and dig in to our archive at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive.

-Berkman Luncheon Series with JOSEPH REAGLE on "Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia" (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/luncheon/2010/10/reagle)

-Radio Berkman 165: Zittrain & Lessig TAKE ON...Net Neutrality! (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/6416)

-"Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives" in Video (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/6385)


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BERKMAN CALENDAR & UPCOMING EVENTS PREVIEW
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See our events calendar if you're curious about future luncheons, discussions, lectures, conferences, and more: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events. All of our events are free and open to the public, unless otherwise noted.


ABOUT US
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The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University was founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development. For more information, visit http://cyber.law.harvard.edu.