News

We are pleased to announce that, through the auspices of the Commission for History and Philosophy of Computing (HAPOC), we will be convening the Working Group on Data Sharing starting this October. The new HAPOC working group will meet online to discuss (your!) work-in-progress, classic texts and recently published works. We invite researchers and curious minds from all backgrounds to join us in order to explore the historical and evolving concepts of data, sharing, and (historically rooted, socially contested, politically supported) aspects of data sharing.

We invite you to offer your draft article, dissertation chapter or book chapter for discussion. Our first meeting takes place on Thursday 17 October at 4pm GMT. Please send an email to Vassilis.Galanos@stir.ac.uk to get access links, details and ask questions. The first meeting is to discuss a classic text and decide together on the dates of upcoming events.

We wish to create an inclusive hub for interdisciplinary collaboration among early career researchers to foster a deeper understanding of the significant role that data sharing plays within and beyond computerised contexts. Throughout our first year, we hope to delve into various perspectives on the concept of data, aiming for a comprehensive understanding that spans digital and pre-digital eras.

Our events are convened roughly every two months for 1-1.5h. They provide a platform for thoughtful dialogue among historians, philosophers, technologists, STS and media scholars. Embodying a spirit of informality and cheerfulness, our sessions are designed to be engaging and insightful, offering regular participants networking opportunities. We provide multiple ways to get involved – whether by circulating your full paper confidentially prior to the event or present to get and offer real-time feedback. In addition, we are planning occasional guest invited talks and interactions with other colleagues exploring data-related themes. Although we do not offer scholarships or funding, your engagement – as part of your academic commitments or sparked by pure curiosity – will open doors to valuable cross-national and cross-disciplinary collaborations.

Please get in touch! Your participation is key to enriching our collective understanding of data sharing, its enabling technologies, and its impacts. If you know of people who might be interested to participate and get involved in this new HAPOC working group, please do circulate this announcement.

Our initiators, Barbara Hof (Lausanne), Vassilis Galanos (Stirling), Apolline Taillandier (Cambridge), Xiao Yang (Edinburgh), and George Zoukas (Sheffield), are excited to extend this invitation to you!

Call for contributions

Deadline: 15 August 2024

We are delighted to announce the 6th Workshop on the History and Philosophy of Programming (HaPoP-6). We invite contributions on the history and philosophy of programming broadly understood, including different conceptual and practical aspects of programming, the relation of programming practices to other social and scientific practices, the aesthetics of programming, the development of programming languages and others.

In addition to general aspects of programming, this year’s workshop will focus on conceptions of ‘fairness’ and ‘bias’ in the history and philosophy of programming. Practices of coding and the evaluation of computer programs have changed with the rise of machine learning and so-called ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI). The increasing automation of programming has led to questions about programming practices, transparency, and evaluative standards in programming in general. In particular, there has been an increasing concern with ‘fairness’ and ‘bias’ within a wide range of programs and applications, affecting practitioners, decision-makers and users. In parallel, these questions have (re-)emerged in philosophy, computational linguistics, media theory, sociology, political theory and related fields.

At the 6th HaPoP workshop, we want to develop a deeper understanding of strengths and limitations of conceptions of ‘fairness’ and ‘bias,’ within a reflection on programming at large. We hope to develop these concepts from a historical, philosophical, and technical perspective, bringing into view the epistemological standpoints and material histories involved. This call is anchored in the conviction that a new kind of foundational research is needed to come to terms with the social implications of and in programming, which cannot be addressed by any single discipline. We strive for accessible presentations as the workshop will be open to people from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds.

We invite abstracts on the history and philosophy of programming, including, but not restricted to the following topics:

• Histories and Philosophy of Programming
• Conceptions of fairness and bias in programming
• Error, correctness, evaluation, and accountability in programming practices
• Programming at the crossroads of formal, empirical, and social sciences
• Labour conditions in and around programming
• Programming and the law
• Histories of feminist or emancipatory practices of programming
• Histories of critical code studies
• Teaching Programming

We particularly invite graduate students and early career researchers from underrepresented communities and disadvantaged backgrounds. Travel funding will be available for graduate students and researchers without permanent employment. Requests for travel funding of up to 250 EUR should be directed to treasurer@hapoc.org. Final decisions on the allocation of travel funds will be made by September 25.

Abstracts of a maximum of 500 words (including sources) should be sent to cambridge-2024@hapoc.org by August 15. Final decisions will be announced by September 15.

Download the full call for contributions to HaPoP-6

Organisers

Amira Moeding (PhD Student in History, University of Cambridge), Nanna Saeten (PhD Student in POLIS, University of Cambridge), Dr Richard Staley (History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge)

Access

If you have specific accessibility needs for this event please get in touch with the organisers.

The Japanese Association for the Philosophy of Science (JAPS) and History of Science Society in Japan (HSSJ), correspondents to DLMPST and DHST respectively (the international associations both of which HAPOC is a commission) have invited us to participate to their joint conference on June 14-16, 2024, at Waseda University, Tokyo. Henri Stephanou, our Treasurer and Council Member, will give a talk in a keynote session on June 16 at 15-17H JST (8-10H CET) on “Automation v Augmentation: the two forms of technology at work” alongside Pr. Mai Sugimoto, from HSSJ, who will give a talk on “`Low-Grade Human Labor’ and Computers: Discourses on Technological Unemployment in the Mid-20th Century”. Attached of the poster of the event, which will be retransmitted by zoom. A link will be available shortly.

This event has been organized by Mitsuhiro Okada, Jun Otsuka (from JAPS), Mai Sugimoto (from HSSJ), Alberto Naibo (from HaPoC).

Henri will also present HAPOC activities to our Japanese colleagues. He will also give a preparatory talk on June 14 on “What is Automation? Organized work processes and computer procedures”.

It is with great sadness that we inform the HAPOC community of the death of Martin Davis, and of his wife Virginia, on January 1st 2023.

Martin Davis will be remembered as a great logician and computer scientist who lived through much of the US computer’s early history. Alongside Yuri Matijasevich, Hilary Putnam and Julia Robinson, he helped solve Hilbert’s 10th problem. He also made basic contributions to connect mathematical logic with computing, most notably through his influential book “Computability and Unsolvability” which is, still today, a classic.

It was our greatest pleasure and honor to have Martin as one of the keynote speakers at the very first HAPOC conference held in Ghent in 2011, where Virginia accompanied him. The title of his keynote was “Universality is Ubiquitous” – a talk based on one of Martin’s more historical works, “The universal computer” in which he argued for the significance of mathematical logic for the emergence of the first computers. In the very spirit of any HaPoC meeting, his viewpoint stimulated a heated debate with the historians present in the room. Martin did not mind debate and this was a very typical aspect of his friendly and open character. Later in 2018 Martin accepted another invitation by HaPoC to contribute at the Special Session organised every year as part of the Conference Computability in Europe, that year in Kiel (Germany): on that occasion he showed again his unfaltering enthusiasm for connecting the past and the present of computing with a talk titled “Turing’s Vision and Deep Learning”. On that occasion a toast was made to celebrate his 90th birthday.

Above all, we will remember Martin and Virginia as two people who stood out for their kindness, their integrity, their love for one another, and their generosity. Their memory will stay alive with all of us who try to live by the same ethos.

The Commission for the History and Philosophy of Computing (HaPoC), as part of the Division of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology (DLMPST) makes a call for submissions of proposals for symposia to take place at the next CLMPST 2023 in Buenos Aires (Argentina).

List of topics of interest for the HaPoC commission (not limited to):

• Historical and philosophical perspectives on computing knowledge, objects, and practices
• Social, cultural, and pedagogical aspects of computing
• Computing and the human sciences
• Epistemological and ethical dimensions of computing
• Impact of computing technologies
• Proposals by South American scholars or focusing on South American computational practices are especially encouraged.

Submissions should be made following the instructions below. We recommend that interested participants get in touch with the HaPoC Commission as soon as possible, and no later than November 15th 2022. All questions about the commission should be directed to info@hapoc.org.

Important information

Symposia are groups of talks on a common theme. Each symposium consists of four to twelve papers.

In EasyChair – https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=clmpst2023 – please make a submission for (a) the symposium as a whole; and (b) each paper in the symposium (so, for example, for a four-paper symposium, you should make a total of five submissions).

(a) For the symposium as a whole, please provide an abstract with a general description of the format and the topic of the proposed symposium and its significance (up to 500 words), and suggest a symposium chair. Indicate to which congress section you submit the symposium (tick the appropriate box). After the abstract, please list the titles of the talks in the order they should appear at the conference. Please add the acronym “HaPoC” followed by the acronym for the symposium at the beginning of the title of the symposium (e.g., HaPoC-: ). The acronym will be used by the Programme Committee to keep the individual submissions in a proposal together during reviewing and when creating the conference programme.

(b) For each paper within a symposium, please submit a 500-word abstract (including references). Indicate to which congress section the symposium belongs (tick the appropriate box). Please add the acronym “HaPoC” followed by the acronym of the symposium at the beginning of the title of the talk (HaPoC-<Symposium acronym>: <Title of the individual talk>). The acronym will be used by the Programme Committee to keep the individual submissions in a proposal together during reviewing and when creating the conference program.

Note to symposium organisers: papers intended to be presented as parts of a symposium must be submitted by their respective authors. Symposium organisers should contact all symposium speakers in advance and make sure that they submit their abstracts by the submission deadline of 15 December 2022.

The symposium description is submitted by the symposium organiser by the same deadline. Please make sure that all parts of the submission are prepared for anonymous review and submitted to the same congress section (the same box is ticked in all of them). When submitting a symposium proposal, the EasyChair requires you to take the role of a “speaker“. This is for formal reasons only, and in no way precludes you from submitting a paper of your own (to that same symposium, to a different symposium, or a contributed paper). In this case, you will appear as a “speaker“ on 2 submissions, one of which must be the symposium proposal.

The allocated time for each symposium paper is 30 minutes. For instance, a symposium with 4 speakers is a 2 hour session (4 x 30 minutes). Note that if a symposium consists of more than 4 speakers, it might be split into two sessions due to coffee breaks in the programme.

Rules for multiple presentations

(a) Every corresponding author is allowed to submit only one individual or symposium paper as a “speaker”. (Organising a symposium does not count as being a “speaker”, despite the labelling in EasyChair.)

(b) Authors are permitted to be listed as non-corresponding co-authors of additional papers.

(c) The corresponding author of each paper as well as the organiser of a symposium must be registered as a participant at the Congress and present the paper in Buenos Aires.

All questions about submissions should be directed to the Congress Secretaries, Prof. Federico Pailos and Prof. Luis Urtubey, at secretariosclmpst2023@gmail.com

Important dates:

December 15, 2022 Deadline for symposia submissions
March 2023 Notifications of acceptance
March 2023 Congress registration opens
April 30, 2023 Deadline for early bird registrations
July 1, 2023 No more refunds for registration cancellations
July 24-29, 2023 17th CLMPST, University of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires