Sam Hind
Biographic Data
| ID | 291080 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sam Hind |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sam |
| FAMILY NAME | Hind |
| SIGNATURE | HIND S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Siegen |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8347-3695 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 38 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Scaling Ai in the Cloud: The Disruption of “Cloudification” in Connected and Autonomous Vehicles
This paper examines the case of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs)—cars integrating “smart” digital components—to explore how “cloudification” has emerged as a key infrastructural transformation in the industrialization of AI. CAVs illustrate the “industrialization” of AI as it moves beyond specialized applications to acquire infrastructural characteristics across multiple industries. The paper builds upon insights from three fields: platfo…
Driving the hype: LLMs as ‘general-purpose’ promise in the autonomous vehicle industry
Proponents of autonomous vehicles are proclaiming a new era, driven by innovations derived from large language models (LLMs). Following a decade of highly public failures and the concurrent redirection of capital and attention towards generative AI, firms in the autonomous vehicle industry have turned to LLM-style techniques as the basis for a rebooted commercialisation effort. Through a technographic analysis of an annual industry event, Nvidia …
Orchestrating scalability: How patents render cloud imaginaries in CAV innovation
This article explores how cloud computing enables and shapes the scaling of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs), positioning cloud infrastructure as a technology, strategy, and imaginary central to the scaling of AI. Using a dataset of 69,421 global patent families, we analyse how diverse actors—including automotive manufacturers, chipmakers, electronics companies, autonomous vehicle firms, and telecom/mapping providers—mobilise cloud techno…
In the Shadow of LLMS: Trouble in the “Smart” Automotive Industry
This paper explores the tumultuous landscape of the modern automotive industry, once heralded as the epitome of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications through the promise of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). The introduction of large language models (LLMs), notably with ChatGPT's launch in November 2022, marked a turning point, casting shadows over the ambitious goals set by major tech and automotive players. …
The Political Economy of Ai as Platform: Infrastructures, Power, and the Ai Industry
The artificial intelligence (AI) sector is experiencing rapid growth, with a projected market size of $1.3 trillion by 2032 according to industry reports. The landscape shifted significantly with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, prompting major players like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta, alongside popular apps such as TikTok and Snapchat, to make substantial investments in AI. There has been an influx of new AI products and updates, resh…
Challenges as catalysts: How Waymo’s Open Dataset Challenges shape AI development
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are becoming increasingly significant areas of research for scholars in science and technology studies (STS) and media studies. In March 2020, Waymo, Google/Alphabet’s autonomous vehicle project, introduced the ‘Open Dataset Virtual Challenge’, an annual competition leveraging their Waymo Open Dataset. This freely accessible dataset comprises annotated autonomous vehicle data from their own W…
From United Steel to Waymo: Industrializing simulation
The use of computers for simulation work can be traced back to the 1950s, and the pioneering work of Stafford Beer, KD Tocher and others at Cybor House in Sheffield, UK, the research and development (R&D) department of British steelmakers, United Steel. This innovative simulation work sought to offer an abstracted, ‘total’ environment of the steelmaking process in which different operational activities could be modeled. Critical to this work was …
Simulation and the reality gap: Moments in a prehistory of synthetic data
This paper sketches a prehistory of synthetic data in the development of simulation technologies. Synthetic data is connected to simulation by the technical problem of the reality gap: the gap between the synthetic data a model is trained on and the real-world data it is deployed on. The reality gap is presented as a novelty both generated and solved by synthetic data. We demonstrate that the reality gap has plagued simulation technologies since …
Cynical technical practice: From AI to APIs
In this article, we examine how critical thinking, methods and design are used within the tech industry, using Philip Agre’s notion of critical technical practice (CTP) to consider the rise of ‘cynical’ technical practice. Arguments by tech firms that their AI systems are ethical, contextual, situated or fair, as well as APIs that are privacy-compliant and offer greater user control, are now commonplace. Yet, these justifications routinely disgui…
Sensor work: Enabling the interoperation of autonomous vehicles
This article examines the “sensor work” carried out in the development of autonomous vehicles which, without sensor data, would not and arguably still do not, have the capacity to decide on where, and how, to drive. I begin by discussing three aspects of sensor technologies considered to be the foundation for sensor work being carried out in autonomous vehicle settings, namely the distribution, processing, and sourcing of sensor technologies and …
Interrogating Datafication: Towards a Praxeology of Data
What constitutes a data practice and how do contemporary digital media technologies reconfigure our understanding of practices in general? Autonomously acting media, distributed digital infrastructures, and sensor-based media environments challenge the conditions of accounting for data practices both theoretically and empirically. Which forms of cooperation are constituted in and by data practices? And how are human and nonhuman agencies distribu…
Seeing the City Digitally: Processing Urban Space and Time
The argument that many cities are now digitally mediated is an increasingly familiar one.The social, experiential and physical spaces of a city are more and more often designed, defined, navigated and experienced with digital data shared with platforms.But from its app icon to its interface to its advertising campaigns, every platform deploys a wide range of imagery, and most successful social media platforms are based on sharing images.This book…
Making decisions: The normal interventions of Nissan 'mobility managers
In this article I investigate a decentralized infrastructure meant to assist autonomous vehicles in making decisions. More akin to a call centre than a centralized control room, Nissan’s ‘Seamless Autonomous Mobility’ (SAM) project imagines that remote ‘mobility managers’ will intervene in the decision-making of autonomous vehicles, with the assistance of live video streams and other sensor data. Different from other kinds of AI microwork in whic…
Making the Car 'Platform Ready: How Big Tech Is Driving the Platformization of Automobility
Big Tech' platform companies like Alphabet (Google), Apple, and Amazon are deeply invested in the future of automobility-from developing car-specific interfaces and self-driving technology to establishing business partnerships with automakers. Far from business-as-usual, we explain how Big Tech is reshaping the traditional automotive industry by making the car 'platform ready,' as imposed on the web before it. The article considers how this novel…
Dashboard design and the 'datafied' driving experience
In this article, I consider how the redesign of vehicle dashboards has restructured car-related data processes. I do so by charting the emergence of two such processes enabled by the redesign of vehicle dashboards: firstly, the transformation of 'geodata' into 'navigational data' with the integration of voice-activated navigation systems into vehicle dashboards, and secondly, the transformation of 'vehicle data' into 'driving data' in the converg…
Re-Valuing Platforms, Reclaiming the Local
This panel brings together emerging scholarship that challenges the contemporary hold of major platforms over public and private life. It critically questions the scope, valence, and embeddedness of platforms in the everyday, challenging (commercial) platformization as the new normal. We attempt to offer new ways of managing, changing and co-opting platforms for the benefit of end-users rather than proprietors only. To this end, the panel discuss…
Between capture and addition: The ontogenesis of cartographic calculation
Infrastructural surveillance
This article proposes a new model of privacy: infrastructural surveillance. It departs from Agre’s classic distinction between surveillance and capture by examining the sociotechnical claims of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) as requiring totalising surveillance of passengers and environment in order to operate. By doing so, it contributes to the ongoing debate on the commodification and platformisation of life, paying attention to the u…
Digital navigation and the driving-machine: Supervision, Calculation, Optimization, and Recognition
In this paper, I explore the navigational implications of a possible driving world. In the last few years, autonomous vehicles (AVs) have garnered significant attention, with much of this scrutiny centered on the technical possibilities, legal restrictions, and utilitarian ethics of AVs. In this paper, I look at how AVs are radically transforming the nature of navigational decision-making. Research into the automation of industrial processes and …
Time for mapping: Cartographic temporalities
The digital era has brought about huge transformations in the map itself, which to date have been largely conceptualised in spatial terms. Novel objects, forms, processes and approaches have emerged and pose new, pressing questions about the temporality of digital maps and contemporary mapping practices: in spite of its implicit spatiality, digital mapping is strongly grounded in time. This collection brings time back into the map, taking up Dore…
Digital mapping as double-tap: Cartographic modes, calculations and failures
In this article, we will ask how Latour's latest project – An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME) – can help us to understand the nature of cartographic modes, calculations and failures. To this end, we will argue that in hismany readings, specifically digital mapping can be said to operate through a ‘double-click’ mode which obscures the [REF–REP] crossing of which he now speaks of in AIME. More appropriately, we refine Latour's argument to s…
Time for mapping
"The digital era has brought about huge transformations in the map itself, which to date have been largely conceptualised in spatial terms. Novel objects, forms, processes and approaches have emerged and pose new, pressing questions about the temporality of digital maps and contemporary mapping practices: in spite of its implicit spatiality, digital mapping is strongly grounded in time. This collection brings time back into the map, taking up Dor…
Digital navigation and the driving-machine: Supervision, Calculation, Optimization, and Recognition
In this paper, I explore the navigational implications of a possible driving world. In the last few years, autonomous vehicles (AVs) have garnered significant attention, with much of this scrutiny centered on the technical possibilities, legal restrictions, and utilitarian ethics of AVs. In this paper, I look at how AVs are radically transforming the nature of navigational decision-making. Research into the automation of industrial processes and …
Infrastructural surveillance
This article proposes a new model of privacy: infrastructural surveillance. It departs from Agre’s classic distinction between surveillance and capture by examining the sociotechnical claims of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) as requiring totalising surveillance of passengers and environment in order to operate. By doing so, it contributes to the ongoing debate on the commodification and platformisation of life, paying attention to the u…
Seeing the City Digitally: Processing Urban Space and Time
The argument that many cities are now digitally mediated is an increasingly familiar one.The social, experiential and physical spaces of a city are more and more often designed, defined, navigated and experienced with digital data shared with platforms.But from its app icon to its interface to its advertising campaigns, every platform deploys a wide range of imagery, and most successful social media platforms are based on sharing images.This book…
Digital mapping as double-tap: Cartographic modes, calculations and failures
In this article, we will ask how Latour's latest project – An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME) – can help us to understand the nature of cartographic modes, calculations and failures. To this end, we will argue that in hismany readings, specifically digital mapping can be said to operate through a ‘double-click’ mode which obscures the [REF–REP] crossing of which he now speaks of in AIME. More appropriately, we refine Latour's argument to s…
Making the Car 'Platform Ready: How Big Tech Is Driving the Platformization of Automobility
Big Tech' platform companies like Alphabet (Google), Apple, and Amazon are deeply invested in the future of automobility-from developing car-specific interfaces and self-driving technology to establishing business partnerships with automakers. Far from business-as-usual, we explain how Big Tech is reshaping the traditional automotive industry by making the car 'platform ready,' as imposed on the web before it. The article considers how this novel…
Between capture and addition: The ontogenesis of cartographic calculation
Simulation and the reality gap: Moments in a prehistory of synthetic data
This paper sketches a prehistory of synthetic data in the development of simulation technologies. Synthetic data is connected to simulation by the technical problem of the reality gap: the gap between the synthetic data a model is trained on and the real-world data it is deployed on. The reality gap is presented as a novelty both generated and solved by synthetic data. We demonstrate that the reality gap has plagued simulation technologies since …
Dashboard design and the 'datafied' driving experience
In this article, I consider how the redesign of vehicle dashboards has restructured car-related data processes. I do so by charting the emergence of two such processes enabled by the redesign of vehicle dashboards: firstly, the transformation of 'geodata' into 'navigational data' with the integration of voice-activated navigation systems into vehicle dashboards, and secondly, the transformation of 'vehicle data' into 'driving data' in the converg…
Digital mapping as double-tap: Cartographic modes, calculations and failures
In this article, we will ask how Latour's latest project – An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME) – can help us to understand the nature of cartographic modes, calculations and failures. To this end, we will argue that in hismany readings, specifically digital mapping can be said to operate through a ‘double-click’ mode which obscures the [REF–REP] crossing of which he now speaks of in AIME. More appropriately, we refine Latour's argument to s…
Time for mapping: Cartographic temporalities
The digital era has brought about huge transformations in the map itself, which to date have been largely conceptualised in spatial terms. Novel objects, forms, processes and approaches have emerged and pose new, pressing questions about the temporality of digital maps and contemporary mapping practices: in spite of its implicit spatiality, digital mapping is strongly grounded in time. This collection brings time back into the map, taking up Dore…
Infrastructural surveillance
This article proposes a new model of privacy: infrastructural surveillance. It departs from Agre’s classic distinction between surveillance and capture by examining the sociotechnical claims of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) as requiring totalising surveillance of passengers and environment in order to operate. By doing so, it contributes to the ongoing debate on the commodification and platformisation of life, paying attention to the u…
Digital navigation and the driving-machine: Supervision, Calculation, Optimization, and Recognition
In this paper, I explore the navigational implications of a possible driving world. In the last few years, autonomous vehicles (AVs) have garnered significant attention, with much of this scrutiny centered on the technical possibilities, legal restrictions, and utilitarian ethics of AVs. In this paper, I look at how AVs are radically transforming the nature of navigational decision-making. Research into the automation of industrial processes and …
Re-Valuing Platforms, Reclaiming the Local
This panel brings together emerging scholarship that challenges the contemporary hold of major platforms over public and private life. It critically questions the scope, valence, and embeddedness of platforms in the everyday, challenging (commercial) platformization as the new normal. We attempt to offer new ways of managing, changing and co-opting platforms for the benefit of end-users rather than proprietors only. To this end, the panel discuss…
Between capture and addition: The ontogenesis of cartographic calculation
Dashboard design and the 'datafied' driving experience
In this article, I consider how the redesign of vehicle dashboards has restructured car-related data processes. I do so by charting the emergence of two such processes enabled by the redesign of vehicle dashboards: firstly, the transformation of 'geodata' into 'navigational data' with the integration of voice-activated navigation systems into vehicle dashboards, and secondly, the transformation of 'vehicle data' into 'driving data' in the converg…
Interrogating Datafication: Towards a Praxeology of Data
What constitutes a data practice and how do contemporary digital media technologies reconfigure our understanding of practices in general? Autonomously acting media, distributed digital infrastructures, and sensor-based media environments challenge the conditions of accounting for data practices both theoretically and empirically. Which forms of cooperation are constituted in and by data practices? And how are human and nonhuman agencies distribu…
Seeing the City Digitally: Processing Urban Space and Time
The argument that many cities are now digitally mediated is an increasingly familiar one.The social, experiential and physical spaces of a city are more and more often designed, defined, navigated and experienced with digital data shared with platforms.But from its app icon to its interface to its advertising campaigns, every platform deploys a wide range of imagery, and most successful social media platforms are based on sharing images.This book…
Making decisions: The normal interventions of Nissan 'mobility managers
In this article I investigate a decentralized infrastructure meant to assist autonomous vehicles in making decisions. More akin to a call centre than a centralized control room, Nissan’s ‘Seamless Autonomous Mobility’ (SAM) project imagines that remote ‘mobility managers’ will intervene in the decision-making of autonomous vehicles, with the assistance of live video streams and other sensor data. Different from other kinds of AI microwork in whic…
Making the Car 'Platform Ready: How Big Tech Is Driving the Platformization of Automobility
Big Tech' platform companies like Alphabet (Google), Apple, and Amazon are deeply invested in the future of automobility-from developing car-specific interfaces and self-driving technology to establishing business partnerships with automakers. Far from business-as-usual, we explain how Big Tech is reshaping the traditional automotive industry by making the car 'platform ready,' as imposed on the web before it. The article considers how this novel…
Sensor work: Enabling the interoperation of autonomous vehicles
This article examines the “sensor work” carried out in the development of autonomous vehicles which, without sensor data, would not and arguably still do not, have the capacity to decide on where, and how, to drive. I begin by discussing three aspects of sensor technologies considered to be the foundation for sensor work being carried out in autonomous vehicle settings, namely the distribution, processing, and sourcing of sensor technologies and …
Cynical technical practice: From AI to APIs
In this article, we examine how critical thinking, methods and design are used within the tech industry, using Philip Agre’s notion of critical technical practice (CTP) to consider the rise of ‘cynical’ technical practice. Arguments by tech firms that their AI systems are ethical, contextual, situated or fair, as well as APIs that are privacy-compliant and offer greater user control, are now commonplace. Yet, these justifications routinely disgui…
Time for mapping
"The digital era has brought about huge transformations in the map itself, which to date have been largely conceptualised in spatial terms. Novel objects, forms, processes and approaches have emerged and pose new, pressing questions about the temporality of digital maps and contemporary mapping practices: in spite of its implicit spatiality, digital mapping is strongly grounded in time. This collection brings time back into the map, taking up Dor…
In the Shadow of LLMS: Trouble in the “Smart” Automotive Industry
This paper explores the tumultuous landscape of the modern automotive industry, once heralded as the epitome of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications through the promise of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). The introduction of large language models (LLMs), notably with ChatGPT's launch in November 2022, marked a turning point, casting shadows over the ambitious goals set by major tech and automotive players. …
The Political Economy of Ai as Platform: Infrastructures, Power, and the Ai Industry
The artificial intelligence (AI) sector is experiencing rapid growth, with a projected market size of $1.3 trillion by 2032 according to industry reports. The landscape shifted significantly with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, prompting major players like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta, alongside popular apps such as TikTok and Snapchat, to make substantial investments in AI. There has been an influx of new AI products and updates, resh…
Challenges as catalysts: How Waymo’s Open Dataset Challenges shape AI development
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are becoming increasingly significant areas of research for scholars in science and technology studies (STS) and media studies. In March 2020, Waymo, Google/Alphabet’s autonomous vehicle project, introduced the ‘Open Dataset Virtual Challenge’, an annual competition leveraging their Waymo Open Dataset. This freely accessible dataset comprises annotated autonomous vehicle data from their own W…
From United Steel to Waymo: Industrializing simulation
The use of computers for simulation work can be traced back to the 1950s, and the pioneering work of Stafford Beer, KD Tocher and others at Cybor House in Sheffield, UK, the research and development (R&D) department of British steelmakers, United Steel. This innovative simulation work sought to offer an abstracted, ‘total’ environment of the steelmaking process in which different operational activities could be modeled. Critical to this work was …
Simulation and the reality gap: Moments in a prehistory of synthetic data
This paper sketches a prehistory of synthetic data in the development of simulation technologies. Synthetic data is connected to simulation by the technical problem of the reality gap: the gap between the synthetic data a model is trained on and the real-world data it is deployed on. The reality gap is presented as a novelty both generated and solved by synthetic data. We demonstrate that the reality gap has plagued simulation technologies since …
Scaling Ai in the Cloud: The Disruption of “Cloudification” in Connected and Autonomous Vehicles
This paper examines the case of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs)—cars integrating “smart” digital components—to explore how “cloudification” has emerged as a key infrastructural transformation in the industrialization of AI. CAVs illustrate the “industrialization” of AI as it moves beyond specialized applications to acquire infrastructural characteristics across multiple industries. The paper builds upon insights from three fields: platfo…
Driving the hype: LLMs as ‘general-purpose’ promise in the autonomous vehicle industry
Proponents of autonomous vehicles are proclaiming a new era, driven by innovations derived from large language models (LLMs). Following a decade of highly public failures and the concurrent redirection of capital and attention towards generative AI, firms in the autonomous vehicle industry have turned to LLM-style techniques as the basis for a rebooted commercialisation effort. Through a technographic analysis of an annual industry event, Nvidia …
Orchestrating scalability: How patents render cloud imaginaries in CAV innovation
This article explores how cloud computing enables and shapes the scaling of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs), positioning cloud infrastructure as a technology, strategy, and imaginary central to the scaling of AI. Using a dataset of 69,421 global patent families, we analyse how diverse actors—including automotive manufacturers, chipmakers, electronics companies, autonomous vehicle firms, and telecom/mapping providers—mobilise cloud techno…
Computer Science (14 works) · Engineering (9 works) · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Artificial Intelligence (7 works) · Digital Economy and Work Transformation (7 works) · Business (6 works) · Automotive industry (5 works) · Economics (5 works) · Sociology (5 works)