CS+Law
Research Workshop

When: Third Friday of each month at 1PM Central Time (sometimes fourth Friday; next workshop: Friday, February 21, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time) 

What: First 90 minutes: Two presentations of CS+Law works in progress or new papers with open Q&A. Last 30 minutes: Networking.

Where: Zoom

Who: CS+Law faculty, postdocs, PhD students, and other students (1) enrolled in or who have completed a graduate degree in CS or Law and (2) engaged in CS+Law research intended for publication.

A Steering Committee of CS+Law faculty from Berkeley, Boston U., U. Chicago, Cornell, Georgetown, MIT, North Carolina Central, Northwestern, Ohio State, Penn, Technion, and UCLA organizes the CS+Law Monthly Workshop. A different university serves as the chair for each monthly program and sets the agenda.

Why: The Steering Committee’s goals include building community, facilitating the exchange of ideas, and getting students involved. To accomplish this, we ask that participants commit to attending regularly.

Computer Science + Law is a rapidly growing area. It is increasingly common that a researcher in one of these fields must interact with the other discipline. For example, there is significant research in each field regarding the law and regulation of computation, the use of computation in legal systems and governments, and the representation of law and legal reasoning. There has been a significant increase in interdisciplinary research collaborations between researchers from CS and Law. Our goal is to create a forum for the exchange of ideas in a collegial environment that promotes building community, collaboration, and research that helps to further develop CS+Law as a field.

Workshop 31: Friday, February 21, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time 

Please join us for our next CS+Law Research Workshop online on Friday, February 21, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Chicago Time).

Workshop 30 Organizer:  Cornell University (James Grimmelmann)

Agenda:

20-minute presentation - Madiha Choksi

10-minute Q&A

20-minute presentation - Kenny Peng

10-minute Q&A

30-minute open Q&A about both presentations

30-minute open discussion 

Presentation 1: The Brief and Wondrous Life of Open Models

Presenter: Madiha Choksi, Ph.D. student in the Department of Computing and Information Science at Cornell.

Abstract: 

Hugging Face is the definitive hub for individuals and organizations coalescing around the shared goal of "democratizing'" AI. While open-source (OS) AI draws on the same ideological narratives of OS software, the artifacts, and modes of collaboration remain fundamentally different. Research on the platform has shown that a fraction of repositories account for most interactions, ambiguous licensing and governance norms prevail, and corporate actors such as Meta, Qwen, and OpenAI dominate discussions. However, the nature of model-based communities, their collaborative capacities, and the effects of these conditions on governance remain under-explored.

This work empirically investigates whether models—the central artifact in OS AI ecosystems—can serve as a viable foundation for building communities and enacting governance within the ecosystem. Our contributions are twofold. First, we use interaction and participation data on Hugging Face to trace collaboration --or the lack thereof-- at the model level. Second, we evaluate how governance varies across models with persistent communities with regular interaction and growth over time. We describe three phenomena: model obsolescence, nomadic communities, and persistent communities. Our findings demonstrate that the absence of robust communities hinder governance in artifact-driven ecosystems, ultimately questioning whether traditional principles of openness foundational to OS software can be effectively translated to open AI.

Presentation 2: Rescuing Counterspeech: A Bridging-Based Approach to Combating Misinformation

Presenter: Kenny Peng, computer science PhD student at Cornell.

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.12699 

Abstract: 

Social media has a misinformation problem, and counterspeech— fighting bad speech with more speech—has been an ineffective solution. Here, we argue that bridging-based ranking—an algorithmic approach to promoting content favored by users of diverse viewpoints—is a promising approach to helping counterspeech combat misinformation. By identifying counterspeech that is favored both by users who are inclined to agree and by users who are inclined to disagree with a piece of misinformation, bridging promotes counterspeech that persuades the users most likely to believe the misinformation. Furthermore, this algorithmic approach leverages crowd-sourced votes, shifting discretion from platforms back to users and enabling counterspeech at the speed and scale required to combat misinformation online. Bridging is respectful of users’ autonomy and encourages broad participation in healthy exchanges; it offers a way for the free speech tradition to persist in modern speech environments.

Join us to get meeting information

Join our group to get the agenda and Zoom information for each meeting and engage in the CS+Law discussion.

Interested in presenting?

Submit a proposed topic to present. We strongly encourage the presentation of works in progress, although we will consider the presentation of more polished and published projects.

2024-25 Series Schedule

Friday, September 20, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: Northwestern)

Friday, October 18, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: UC Berkeley)

Friday, November 15, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: University of Chicago)

Friday, January 17, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: UPenn)

Friday, February 21, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: Cornell)

Friday, March 21, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: Tel Aviv University + Harvard)

Friday, April 18, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: TBD)

Friday, May 16, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Central Time (Organizer: Georgetown)

Background - CS+Law Monthly Workshop

Northwestern Professors Jason Hartline and Dan Linna convened an initial meeting of 21 CS+Law faculty at various universities on August 17, 2021 to propose a series of monthly CS+Law research conferences. Hartline and Linna sought volunteers to sit on a steering committee. Hartline, Linna, and their Northwestern colleagues provide the platform and administrative support for the series.