As part of its upcoming course called “Beyond Big Data,” Worldview Stanford interviewed CASBS director Margaret Levi, who focused on trust and confidence in institutions in the Internet age.
It’s essential that a course on Big Data involves perspectives from the social and behavioral sciences. What distinguishes trust from confidence, both among ourselves as well as between us and powerful corporate entities? How do we characterize our relationship with high-tech firms in an anarchic context sometimes characterized by episodes of hacking and loss of privacy? Why do we continue to rely on systems that are subject to violations? Are corporations like Amazon and Google acting in our interest? Are they adequately motivated, incentivized, and competent to earn our trust and/or confidence? Levi invokes these questions and others in a way that will inspire and stimulate discussion among students and other viewers.
Worldview Stanford is a campus initiative designed to create interdisciplinary learning experiences for professionals in order to help them prepare for a wide range of strategic challenges, focusing especially on issues that leverage Stanford’s intellectual strengths. Employing a hybrid learning format, it already has developed courses on “The Science of Decision Making” and “Environmental Risk and Resilience,” among others.Learn more about Worldview Stanford here.
The “Beyond Big Data” course is in collaboration with Stanford’s Cyber Initiative, whose mission is to produce research and frame debates on the future of cyber-social systems. CASBS is in an excellent position to play a role in informing and advancing this mission. In 2016-17, in fact, the Stanford Cyber Initiative will support one CASBS fellow who will engage in producing policy-relevant research on the integration of cyber technologies into our ways of life and informing debates about urgent cyber issues.Learn more about the CASBS partnership with the Stanford Cyber Initiative here.
Use of video by permission of Worldview Stanford
