Alan F Blackwell
Biographic Data
| ID | 237886 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alan F Blackwell |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alan F |
| FAMILY NAME | Blackwell |
| SIGNATURE | BLACKWELL A F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5557-574X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 38 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The BS meter: Detecting politics and labour through ChatGPT’s language
What can we learn about language from studying how it is used by ChatGPT and other large language model (LLM)-based chatbots? In this paper, we analyse the distinctive character of language generated by ChatGPT, in relation to questions raised by natural language processing pioneer, and student of Wittgenstein, Margaret Masterman. Following frequent complaints that LLM-based chatbots produce “bullshit,” in the sense of Frankfurt’s popular monogra…
Commentary: There is also a C in HCI
Making relations: Re-imagining AI through crafted and embodied knowledge systems in Moana Oceania
This paper addresses the problems of data colonialism from a standpoint that not only challenges the legitimacy of colonial economics but also the epistemological legitimacy of data as a raw material from which knowledge and knowledge systems might be generated. Our reflexive investigation centres on knowledge systems of Aotearoa-New Zealand and the wider Moana Oceania through embodied traditions of wānanga and talanoa. As we explain, these offer…
Taking data science into the forest
We contribute to the Science in the Forest, Science in the Past series by investigating the specific practices of “data science”, a set of contemporary methods associated with large-scale data processing infrastructure that shares many characteristics with artificial intelligence technologies. We offer a critical history of data science in relation to the engagement of Western publics with environmental policy through “citizen science”, and contr…
Moral Codes: Designing Alternatives to AI
Why the world needs less AI and better programming languages. Decades ago, we believed that robots and computers would take over all the boring jobs and drudgery, leaving humans to a life of leisure. This hasn't happened. Instead, humans are still doing boring jobs, and even worse, AI researchers have built technology that is creative, self-aware, and emotional-doing the tasks humans were supposed to enjoy. How did we get here? In Moral Codes, Al…
Wonders without number: The information economy of data and its subjects
The two kinds of artificial intelligence, or how not to confuse objects and subjects
The following essay is a stylistic experiment for Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, reflecting on a personal research agenda and trajectory, in relation to the disciplines that the author has engaged with.Interdisciplinary enquiry often arises from the idiosyncratic experiences and decisions of an individual serendipitously following curiosity, alongside the practical contingencies that shape anybody's career.Such a reflection, if spanning multi…
Live Coding: A User's Manual
Perception of rhythmic agency for conversational labeling
There are well-understood benefits of designing intelligent interactive systems to support mixed-initiative interaction, in which there is a back-and-forth dynamic between user and system. We explore the effects of introducing rhythmic elements into this interaction, building on the phenomenon of conversational entrainment in human-to-human conversation. We demonstrate that well-chosen rhythms reduce user stress, increase confidence, and improve …
Inventing Artificial Intelligence in Ethiopia
Artificial Intelligence (AI) research has always been embedded in complex networks of cultural imagination, corporate business, and sociopolitical power relations. The great majority of AI research around the world, and almost all commentary on that research, assumes that the imagination, business, and political systems of Western culture and the Global North are sufficient to understand how this technology should develop in future. This article …
Ethnographic artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence research is seldom conducted ethnographically. Nevertheless, the field itself has a distinctive culture – an engineering imaginary within which ‘general intelligence’ is considered to be a phenomenon that can be both defined and tested by reference to some universal (probably mathematical) standard. This paper describes a research agenda that sets out to question those assumptions, through a programme of ethnographic field…
Data as Process: From Objective Resource to Contingent Performance
Adopting a strong process perspective, this chapter seeks to problematize the way in which data are typically conceived in the information sciences and in contemporary organizational discourse. Drawing on evidence from an ongoing multidisciplinary study of data reuse in acute healthcare we argue that, contrary to the prevalent conception of data as a fundamental, natural resource that exists “out there” in the world, data are constituted through …
Objective functions: (In)humanity and inequity in artificial intelligence
It is hard to say which is more satisfying: the discovery of order in the material world (science), or the imposition of order on that world (technology). When human language takes material form, through digital computing and information storage devices, it seems even more satisfying to treat knowledge itself as the object of either science or craft. In Cambridge, we hedge our bets between these options, with departments of both Computer Science …
Torino: A Tangible Programming Language Inclusive of Children with Visual Disabilities
Across the world, policy initiatives are being developed to engage children with computer programming and computational thinking. Diversity and inclusion has been a strong force in this agenda, but children with disabilities have largely been omitted from the conversation. Currently, there are no age appropriate tools for teaching programming concepts and computational thinking to primary school children with visual disabilities. We address this …
Filling the big hole in HCI research
column Share on Filling the big hole in HCI research Author: Alan F. Blackwell University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory University of Cambridge Computer LaboratoryView Profile Authors Info & Claims InteractionsVolume 22Issue 6November - December 2015 pp 37–41https://doi.org/10.1145/2830317Published:28 October 2015Publication History 10citation963DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations10Total Downloads963Last 12 Months159Last 6 weeks27 Get Citation Ale…
Work Meets Life: Exploring the Integrative Study of Work in Living Systems
Work as fundamental to life, explored at different levels of organization from the perspectives of a variety of biological and nonbiological disciplines. The work performed by living systems ranges from photosynthesis to prodigious feats of computation and organization. This multidisciplinary volume explores the relationships between work and the study of work across many different levels of organization. By addressing how work gets done, and why…
Pux: Patterns of User Experience
research-article PUX: patterns of user experience Share on Authors: Alan F. Blackwell University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory University of Cambridge Computer LaboratoryView Profile , Sally Fincher University of Kent at Canterbury University of Kent at CanterburyView Profile Authors Info & Claims InteractionsVolume 17Issue 2March + April 2010 pp 27–31https://doi.org/10.1145/1699775.1699782Published:01 March 2010 5citation873DownloadsMetricsTo…
When Systemizers Meet Empathizers: Universalism and the Prosthetic Imagination
This contribution is part of a special issue on History and Human Nature, comprising an essay by G.E.R. Lloyd and fifteen invited responses.Keywords: HISTORY AND HUMAN NATUREG. E. R. LLOYDRELATIVISMDESIGNAFFECTIVE COMPUTINGAUTISMMAN-MACHINE INTERACTION
Gesture and Embodied Interaction: Capturing Motion/Data/Value
Gesture and Embodied Interaction is a five-month practice-led scoping project which explored motion capture development perspectives from artistic, technological and business innovation standpoints. It convened an interdisciplinary community from the arts, sciences and business studies, experienced in practice-driven collaborative research. Effort was focused on two prototyping workshops in Newcastle and Cambridge, bridged by an interim work sess…
Crafting a Critical Technical Practice
In recent years, the category of “practice-based research” has become an essential component of discourse around public funding and evaluation of the arts in British higher education. When included under the umbrella of public policy concerned with “the creative industries", technology researchers often find themselves collaborating with artists who consider their own participation to be a form of practice-based research. We are conducting a stud…
Computational Aesthetics as a Negotiated Boundary
Artists use computers in many ways; technologists produce computerised tools of various kinds. The boundary where art meets technology is in creative tension between the needs and the understanding of the two camps. We report on the key questions raised at a meeting between philosophers, psychologists, artists, and technologists to negotiate this boundary
Making Material Culture
The authors present their collaborative investigation into the creative applications of liquid crystal elastomers. They explore the process of making these new materials as well as the question of how artists and scientists can work together to develop new materials and to use them in artistic or architectural applications
Bodies Meet Minds: Choreography and Cognition
The article describes a collaborative research project between choreographer Wayne McGregor and a team of neuroscientists and psychologists concerned with the relationship between mind and bodily movement. The project comprised several areas of research into the neurological and cognitive basis of movement. The article also discusses the mutual benefits of collaboration between the dancers and scientists
Graphic elicitation: Using Research Diagrams as Interview Stimuli
Diagrams are effective instruments of thought and a valuable tool in conveying those thoughts to others. As such, they can be usefully employed as representations of a research domain and act as stimulus materials in interviews. This process of graphic elicitation may encourage contributions from interviewees that are difficult to obtain by other means. By representing concepts and relationships that other visual artefacts cannot depict, diagrams…
Dasher: A Gesture-Driven Data Entry Interface for Mobile Computing
Existing devices for communicating information to computers are bulky, slow, or unreliable. Dasher is an interface incorporating language modeling and driven by continuous two-dimensional gestures (e.g., a mouse, a stylus, or eye-tracker). Tests have shown that, after 1 hr of practice, novice users reach a writing speed of about 20 words per minute (wpm) while taking dictation. Experienced users achieve writing speeds of about 34 wpm, compared wi…
Graphic elicitation: Using Research Diagrams as Interview Stimuli
Diagrams are effective instruments of thought and a valuable tool in conveying those thoughts to others. As such, they can be usefully employed as representations of a research domain and act as stimulus materials in interviews. This process of graphic elicitation may encourage contributions from interviewees that are difficult to obtain by other means. By representing concepts and relationships that other visual artefacts cannot depict, diagrams…
Objective functions: (In)humanity and inequity in artificial intelligence
It is hard to say which is more satisfying: the discovery of order in the material world (science), or the imposition of order on that world (technology). When human language takes material form, through digital computing and information storage devices, it seems even more satisfying to treat knowledge itself as the object of either science or craft. In Cambridge, we hedge our bets between these options, with departments of both Computer Science …
When Systemizers Meet Empathizers: Universalism and the Prosthetic Imagination
This contribution is part of a special issue on History and Human Nature, comprising an essay by G.E.R. Lloyd and fifteen invited responses.Keywords: HISTORY AND HUMAN NATUREG. E. R. LLOYDRELATIVISMDESIGNAFFECTIVE COMPUTINGAUTISMMAN-MACHINE INTERACTION
Ethnographic artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence research is seldom conducted ethnographically. Nevertheless, the field itself has a distinctive culture – an engineering imaginary within which ‘general intelligence’ is considered to be a phenomenon that can be both defined and tested by reference to some universal (probably mathematical) standard. This paper describes a research agenda that sets out to question those assumptions, through a programme of ethnographic field…
Bodies Meet Minds: Choreography and Cognition
The article describes a collaborative research project between choreographer Wayne McGregor and a team of neuroscientists and psychologists concerned with the relationship between mind and bodily movement. The project comprised several areas of research into the neurological and cognitive basis of movement. The article also discusses the mutual benefits of collaboration between the dancers and scientists
Moral Codes: Designing Alternatives to AI
Why the world needs less AI and better programming languages. Decades ago, we believed that robots and computers would take over all the boring jobs and drudgery, leaving humans to a life of leisure. This hasn't happened. Instead, humans are still doing boring jobs, and even worse, AI researchers have built technology that is creative, self-aware, and emotional-doing the tasks humans were supposed to enjoy. How did we get here? In Moral Codes, Al…
The two kinds of artificial intelligence, or how not to confuse objects and subjects
The following essay is a stylistic experiment for Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, reflecting on a personal research agenda and trajectory, in relation to the disciplines that the author has engaged with.Interdisciplinary enquiry often arises from the idiosyncratic experiences and decisions of an individual serendipitously following curiosity, alongside the practical contingencies that shape anybody's career.Such a reflection, if spanning multi…
Dasher: A Gesture-Driven Data Entry Interface for Mobile Computing
Existing devices for communicating information to computers are bulky, slow, or unreliable. Dasher is an interface incorporating language modeling and driven by continuous two-dimensional gestures (e.g., a mouse, a stylus, or eye-tracker). Tests have shown that, after 1 hr of practice, novice users reach a writing speed of about 20 words per minute (wpm) while taking dictation. Experienced users achieve writing speeds of about 34 wpm, compared wi…
Making Material Culture
The authors present their collaborative investigation into the creative applications of liquid crystal elastomers. They explore the process of making these new materials as well as the question of how artists and scientists can work together to develop new materials and to use them in artistic or architectural applications
Bodies Meet Minds: Choreography and Cognition
The article describes a collaborative research project between choreographer Wayne McGregor and a team of neuroscientists and psychologists concerned with the relationship between mind and bodily movement. The project comprised several areas of research into the neurological and cognitive basis of movement. The article also discusses the mutual benefits of collaboration between the dancers and scientists
Graphic elicitation: Using Research Diagrams as Interview Stimuli
Diagrams are effective instruments of thought and a valuable tool in conveying those thoughts to others. As such, they can be usefully employed as representations of a research domain and act as stimulus materials in interviews. This process of graphic elicitation may encourage contributions from interviewees that are difficult to obtain by other means. By representing concepts and relationships that other visual artefacts cannot depict, diagrams…
Pux: Patterns of User Experience
research-article PUX: patterns of user experience Share on Authors: Alan F. Blackwell University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory University of Cambridge Computer LaboratoryView Profile , Sally Fincher University of Kent at Canterbury University of Kent at CanterburyView Profile Authors Info & Claims InteractionsVolume 17Issue 2March + April 2010 pp 27–31https://doi.org/10.1145/1699775.1699782Published:01 March 2010 5citation873DownloadsMetricsTo…
When Systemizers Meet Empathizers: Universalism and the Prosthetic Imagination
This contribution is part of a special issue on History and Human Nature, comprising an essay by G.E.R. Lloyd and fifteen invited responses.Keywords: HISTORY AND HUMAN NATUREG. E. R. LLOYDRELATIVISMDESIGNAFFECTIVE COMPUTINGAUTISMMAN-MACHINE INTERACTION
Gesture and Embodied Interaction: Capturing Motion/Data/Value
Gesture and Embodied Interaction is a five-month practice-led scoping project which explored motion capture development perspectives from artistic, technological and business innovation standpoints. It convened an interdisciplinary community from the arts, sciences and business studies, experienced in practice-driven collaborative research. Effort was focused on two prototyping workshops in Newcastle and Cambridge, bridged by an interim work sess…
Crafting a Critical Technical Practice
In recent years, the category of “practice-based research” has become an essential component of discourse around public funding and evaluation of the arts in British higher education. When included under the umbrella of public policy concerned with “the creative industries", technology researchers often find themselves collaborating with artists who consider their own participation to be a form of practice-based research. We are conducting a stud…
Computational Aesthetics as a Negotiated Boundary
Artists use computers in many ways; technologists produce computerised tools of various kinds. The boundary where art meets technology is in creative tension between the needs and the understanding of the two camps. We report on the key questions raised at a meeting between philosophers, psychologists, artists, and technologists to negotiate this boundary
Work Meets Life: Exploring the Integrative Study of Work in Living Systems
Work as fundamental to life, explored at different levels of organization from the perspectives of a variety of biological and nonbiological disciplines. The work performed by living systems ranges from photosynthesis to prodigious feats of computation and organization. This multidisciplinary volume explores the relationships between work and the study of work across many different levels of organization. By addressing how work gets done, and why…
Filling the big hole in HCI research
column Share on Filling the big hole in HCI research Author: Alan F. Blackwell University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory University of Cambridge Computer LaboratoryView Profile Authors Info & Claims InteractionsVolume 22Issue 6November - December 2015 pp 37–41https://doi.org/10.1145/2830317Published:28 October 2015Publication History 10citation963DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations10Total Downloads963Last 12 Months159Last 6 weeks27 Get Citation Ale…
Torino: A Tangible Programming Language Inclusive of Children with Visual Disabilities
Across the world, policy initiatives are being developed to engage children with computer programming and computational thinking. Diversity and inclusion has been a strong force in this agenda, but children with disabilities have largely been omitted from the conversation. Currently, there are no age appropriate tools for teaching programming concepts and computational thinking to primary school children with visual disabilities. We address this …
Data as Process: From Objective Resource to Contingent Performance
Adopting a strong process perspective, this chapter seeks to problematize the way in which data are typically conceived in the information sciences and in contemporary organizational discourse. Drawing on evidence from an ongoing multidisciplinary study of data reuse in acute healthcare we argue that, contrary to the prevalent conception of data as a fundamental, natural resource that exists “out there” in the world, data are constituted through …
Objective functions: (In)humanity and inequity in artificial intelligence
It is hard to say which is more satisfying: the discovery of order in the material world (science), or the imposition of order on that world (technology). When human language takes material form, through digital computing and information storage devices, it seems even more satisfying to treat knowledge itself as the object of either science or craft. In Cambridge, we hedge our bets between these options, with departments of both Computer Science …
Perception of rhythmic agency for conversational labeling
There are well-understood benefits of designing intelligent interactive systems to support mixed-initiative interaction, in which there is a back-and-forth dynamic between user and system. We explore the effects of introducing rhythmic elements into this interaction, building on the phenomenon of conversational entrainment in human-to-human conversation. We demonstrate that well-chosen rhythms reduce user stress, increase confidence, and improve …
Inventing Artificial Intelligence in Ethiopia
Artificial Intelligence (AI) research has always been embedded in complex networks of cultural imagination, corporate business, and sociopolitical power relations. The great majority of AI research around the world, and almost all commentary on that research, assumes that the imagination, business, and political systems of Western culture and the Global North are sufficient to understand how this technology should develop in future. This article …
Ethnographic artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence research is seldom conducted ethnographically. Nevertheless, the field itself has a distinctive culture – an engineering imaginary within which ‘general intelligence’ is considered to be a phenomenon that can be both defined and tested by reference to some universal (probably mathematical) standard. This paper describes a research agenda that sets out to question those assumptions, through a programme of ethnographic field…
Live Coding: A User's Manual
Wonders without number: The information economy of data and its subjects
The two kinds of artificial intelligence, or how not to confuse objects and subjects
The following essay is a stylistic experiment for Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, reflecting on a personal research agenda and trajectory, in relation to the disciplines that the author has engaged with.Interdisciplinary enquiry often arises from the idiosyncratic experiences and decisions of an individual serendipitously following curiosity, alongside the practical contingencies that shape anybody's career.Such a reflection, if spanning multi…
Taking data science into the forest
We contribute to the Science in the Forest, Science in the Past series by investigating the specific practices of “data science”, a set of contemporary methods associated with large-scale data processing infrastructure that shares many characteristics with artificial intelligence technologies. We offer a critical history of data science in relation to the engagement of Western publics with environmental policy through “citizen science”, and contr…
Moral Codes: Designing Alternatives to AI
Why the world needs less AI and better programming languages. Decades ago, we believed that robots and computers would take over all the boring jobs and drudgery, leaving humans to a life of leisure. This hasn't happened. Instead, humans are still doing boring jobs, and even worse, AI researchers have built technology that is creative, self-aware, and emotional-doing the tasks humans were supposed to enjoy. How did we get here? In Moral Codes, Al…
Commentary: There is also a C in HCI
Making relations: Re-imagining AI through crafted and embodied knowledge systems in Moana Oceania
This paper addresses the problems of data colonialism from a standpoint that not only challenges the legitimacy of colonial economics but also the epistemological legitimacy of data as a raw material from which knowledge and knowledge systems might be generated. Our reflexive investigation centres on knowledge systems of Aotearoa-New Zealand and the wider Moana Oceania through embodied traditions of wānanga and talanoa. As we explain, these offer…
The BS meter: Detecting politics and labour through ChatGPT’s language
What can we learn about language from studying how it is used by ChatGPT and other large language model (LLM)-based chatbots? In this paper, we analyse the distinctive character of language generated by ChatGPT, in relation to questions raised by natural language processing pioneer, and student of Wittgenstein, Margaret Masterman. Following frequent complaints that LLM-based chatbots produce “bullshit,” in the sense of Frankfurt’s popular monogra…
Computer Science (19 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Art (8 works) · Artificial Intelligence (7 works) · Innovative Human-Technology Interaction (7 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Engineering (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Political science (5 works)