Programmable Infrastructures Project
Programmable Infrastructures Project
We use the term "programmable infrastructures" to refer to the political, economic and technological vision that advocates for the introduction of computational infrastructure onto our common infrastructures. The Programmable Infrastructures Project aims to conduct investigations into this large scale transformation with the ultimate objective to identify ways to engage and shape the course of these developments so that we can continue to have democratically managed infrastructures that serve the public interest.
News items
New vacancy: Assistant/Associate Professor position on Programmable Infrastructures
We are excited to announce that the Organisation & Governance Section in the Department of Multi-Actor Systems at the Faculty of Technology,…
Seda Gürses and Femke Snelting talking at a seminar of Deradicalizing the City
Seda Gürses and Femke Snelting will be speaking at a seminar of Deradicalizing the City on Wednesday the 22nd of June (15:00-17:00h) in…
How Big Tech captured our public health system
The privatisation of public services is a long-standing global trend. But in the wake of the pandemic and through the introduction of…
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Team
Team members
Seda Gürses
Seda Gürses is an Associate Professor in the Department of Multi-Actor Systems at TU Delft at the Faculty of Technology Policy and Management (TPM), and an affiliate at the COSIC Group at the Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT), KU Leuven. Previously she received post-doctoral fellowships at COSIC, KU Leuven (BE), Center for Information Technology and Policy (CITP) at Princeton University (USA), at the Media, Culture and Communications Department at NYU Steinhardt and at the Information Law Institute at NYU Law School (USA). Her current research focuses on questions around how changes in the business of computing and the production of software has lead to our current day computational infrastructures (cloud computing and mobile devices as their accessories) concentrated in the hands of "big tech" companies. Further topics she is currently occupied with include privacy engineering, fairness/debiasing and quality requirements towards data pipelines. Read more about Seda on her personal profile
Donald Bertulfo
Donald is a PhD candidate at the TPM Multi Actor Systems Department. He works with Dr. Seda Gürses (daily supervisor) and Prof.dr. Michel van Eeten (promotor) on topics related to the programmable infrastructures agenda, particularly the interaction of agility and computational infrastructures and its consequences in production modes and organizational arrangements. He holds undergraduate degrees in economics and psychology, and a master’s degree in applied mathematics. Prior to TU Delft, he worked as an economics researcher at the Asian Development Bank, focusing on the macroeconomic measurement of global value chains and its implications to jobs and technology, among others.
Nishant Shankar
Nishant is a PhD candidate at the Multi Actor Systems section of the Faculty of Technology, Policy, and Management, where he is advised by Dr. Seda Gürses and Prof. Martijn Warnier. A part of the Programmable Infrastructures research group, he focuses on the political economy of software development and operations in computational infrastructures. His research interests include the business of cloud computing, developer tooling, and mobile devices. He has a background in computer science and engineering, and worked on natural language processing and human computer interaction during his masters.
Thijmen van Gend
Thijmen initially joined the team as Teaching Assistant for the course “Introduction to Cloud as Infrastructure: The effects of the new business of computing on practice” (TPM030A at TU Delft) and now takes on the role of Project Assistant. He currently follows the MSc-programme Complex Systems Engineering and Management and has a strong interest in simulation modelling for socio-technical systems and in legal, economic and ethical dimensions of digital technologies.
Collaborators
Martha Poon
Martha Poon is an interdisciplinary social scientist who researches and writes about the growing relationship between computational infrastructures and financial systems. She has been affiliated to the Centre de sociologie de l’Innovation (Mines ParisTech), Institute for Public Knowledge (New York University), Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation (LSE), Department of Anthropology (The New School), Data & Society Research Institute, Institute for New Economic Thinking, and the Committee on Global Thought (Columbia University).
Agathe Balayn
Agathe Balayn is a PhD student at the Web Information Systems group in the EEMCS (EWI) faculty of Delft University of Technology. Her research is focused on uncovering and characterizing some of the harms that the deployment of machine learning systems into society can raise. The harms that she studies are related to issues of biases in the outputs of the systems, potentially resulting in safety hazards or discrimination and unfairness. While she's interested in any kind of machine learning systems, her research primarily focuses on the ones using image data –machine learning based computer vision– (or sometimes tabular data) to perform classification or regression tasks. She takes a mixed-method approach with qualitative work to identify practices for developing these systems, and algorithmic work to evaluate and develop methods and processes (e.g., for model explainability and debugging).
Femke Snelting
Femke Snelting develops projects at the intersection of design, feminisms, and free software. In various constellations she works on re-imagining computational practices in the interest of flourishing many forms of life. With Seda Gürses, Miriyam Aouragh, and Helen Pritchard, she runs the Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI). Together they convene communities to hold computational infrastructures to account and to articulate what technologies in the “public interest” might be. With Helen Pritchard and Jara Rocha, she activates The Underground Division, an action-research collective that investigates technologies of subsurface rendering. With Constant, association for arts and media, she initiated collective research projects, digital tools, methods and publications (until 2021). With Jara Rocha, she edited Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence (OHP, 2022). Femke supports artistic research at a.pass (Brussels), PhdArts (Leiden), MERIAN (Maastricht) and regularly teaches at XPUB (Rotterdam). Read more about Femke on her personal profile