Audio file
OII session_mixdown_lowres.mp3
Transcript
00:00:04 Veena McCoole
Hello and welcome to a special edition of the Human Interface Podcast from the Oxford Internet Institute.
00:00:09 Veena McCoole
I'm Veena McCool and this time we're celebrating 25 years of the OII with guest alumni who've studied here in Oxford.
00:00:17 Veena McCoole
In 2001 when the OII began, the Internet was a new and exciting place to be.
00:00:22 Veena McCoole
Dial-up was giving way to broadband, Wikipedia was born, and for 400 US dollars, you could buy a first generation iPod.
00:00:31 Veena McCoole
The world's biggest social media network was still two years from launch.
00:00:35 Veena McCoole
No, not Facebook, but MySpace.
00:00:38 Veena McCoole
And AI was just a science fiction dream, or more often, nightmare.
00:00:42 Veena McCoole
Over the next half hour or so, we're going to hear from some stellar alumni, many now working for major tech companies, about how the OII influenced their future.
00:00:52 Veena McCoole
We'll discuss AI and hear how the internet is shaping up for the next 25 years.
00:00:57 Veena McCoole
In a moment, Megha Mishra, who works in the area of responsible AI, shares her experiences.
00:01:03 Veena McCoole
First, Carla Intal, now a Senior Insights Program Manager at LinkedIn.
00:01:08 Veena McCoole
She studied at the OII as a member of the first ever MSC data science cohort in 2018.
00:01:14 Carla Intal
My first job after OII was actually at LinkedIn and I've been here ever since.
00:01:19 Carla Intal
So what I do in that role is I use LinkedIn data to study patterns of buying and selling behavior.
00:01:27 Carla Intal
Like examples, how do sellers interact with their prospects?
00:01:30 Carla Intal
What do they read about on the platform?
00:01:32 Carla Intal
How do they connect?
00:01:34 Carla Intal
All of these types of behaviors between buying and selling.
00:01:36 Carla Intal
So yeah, good stuff.
00:01:38 Veena McCoole
And you were at the OII pre-artificial intelligence.
00:01:42 Veena McCoole
And your work is obviously at the forefront of technology and the way people interact.
00:01:47 Veena McCoole
And I wonder the way you think about tech and its impact on society, has that shifted and evolved in the many years you spent at LinkedIn all the way from when you started as an analyst?
00:01:58 Carla Intal
You know, it definitely changed so much, right?
00:02:00 Carla Intal
So back in 2018, no one really talked about LLMs, right?
00:02:04 Carla Intal
So I remember back then it was called
00:02:07 Carla Intal
NLPs or natural language processing and we had a few people in our cohort who really studied it.
00:02:14 Carla Intal
In 2018, I was thinking like we would be years away from fully understanding that technology, right?
00:02:20 Carla Intal
But look at where we are now.
00:02:21 Carla Intal
So I really can't imagine a day in my life.
00:02:26 Carla Intal
without using AI or an LLM of some sort, right?
00:02:29 Carla Intal
So I really believe we're in an AI revolution now.
00:02:32 Carla Intal
So the world has changed due to this technology, and it continues to change.
00:02:37 Carla Intal
I'm excited to be a part of it because I use it every day in my work.
00:02:40 Carla Intal
And my work at LinkedIn is really much doing a lot of applied AI, from being able to code from scratch to now vibe coding and building things.
00:02:50 Carla Intal
It's really evolved so much.
00:02:53 Carla Intal
and excited to see where it goes.
00:02:55 Veena McCoole
Are there particular skills or experiences from studying data science at the OII that have stayed with you and continue to play a part in what you do at LinkedIn or beyond?
00:03:07 Carla Intal
Yeah, I would probably say one unique thing that the OII has taught me was
00:03:13 Carla Intal
critical thinking, right?
00:03:15 Carla Intal
So I kind of feel like many people come into the OII already with this above average skill set, right?
00:03:21 Carla Intal
We're already knowledgeable in our field.
00:03:23 Carla Intal
We're already fairly technically proficient.
00:03:25 Carla Intal
You know, I've done some coding and we're already good at what we do.
00:03:28 Carla Intal
But I think we left Oxford as better thinkers.
00:03:33 Carla Intal
And what I mean by that is, you know, when explaining concepts to others, for example, in the simplest but clearest way possible, right, like jargon free type of explanations,
00:03:44 Carla Intal
or maybe thinking through a problem more holistically, right?
00:03:47 Carla Intal
So for example, I've learned to like take the other side and seeing it from their point of view, right?
00:03:53 Carla Intal
And then you're able to take a more unbiased approach and you're able to think more big picture, you know, societal impacts, long-term implications.
00:04:02 Carla Intal
In my work, I think that's really quite important.
00:04:04 Carla Intal
Like for example, I may be working on a project
00:04:07 Carla Intal
But I really need to also think about how does this affect downstream?
00:04:12 Carla Intal
How can it impact, let's say, the data infrastructure or one decision that I make in my work?
00:04:16 Carla Intal
How does it affect other people's work?
00:04:18 Carla Intal
How can it be perceived by others?
00:04:21 Carla Intal
Learning this critical thinking skill is very important.
00:04:24 Megha Mishra
My name is Megha Mishra.
00:04:25 Megha Mishra
I spent a year in OII during 2019 to 2020.
00:04:30 Megha Mishra
Since I left OII, I've been in London where I help enterprises operationalize responsible AI, and I also run a global nonprofit furthering gender equity in ML and AI.
00:04:41 Megha Mishra
I would say one of the primary things that has stayed with me is what we call the Oxford method of thinking, which is an experience where you sort of like unlearn everything and unpick everything and sort of like strip it up all the assumptions that you have of all the understanding that
00:04:55 Megha Mishra
and start picking it from the absolute bottom and build on multiple interdisciplinary layers on top.
00:05:02 Megha Mishra
And at the OI, I got a chance to think of it from multiple perspectives.
00:05:05 Megha Mishra
So we think about an X object.
00:05:07 Megha Mishra
We think about it not from just
00:05:09 Megha Mishra
how it is implemented or done or works in a society, but also think about from an economic point of view or from a psychological point of view, from a political standpoint.
00:05:18 Megha Mishra
And these things sort of like encourage you to look at a problem from these different perspectives, which, like I said, are technical, social, political, ethical, and so on.
00:05:26 Megha Mishra
This changes the way you see today's world.
00:05:30 Megha Mishra
It completely changes and it makes you so accepting and so open to learning in life.
00:05:35 Veena McCoole
And the OII is really known for bringing people together across different disciplines, as you alluded to, you know, the networks and relationships that are fostered in the department and beyond.
00:05:46 Veena McCoole
Have any of those connections continued to play a role in your life or career?
00:05:51 Megha Mishra
I mean, I think I met some of the kindest and the best people in the world at OII, and they've absolutely changed the trajectory of my life.
00:05:58 Veena McCoole
Megha Mishra, and before that, Carla Intal.
00:06:01 Veena McCoole
Megha mentioned how the world has changed due to AI technology.
00:06:05 Veena McCoole
And we're going to talk more about approaches to AI with our next guests.
00:06:08 Lofred Madzou
So my name is Lofred Mazu.
00:06:10 Lofred Madzou
I'm A French Congolese.
00:06:12 Lofred Madzou
I'm the CEO and co-founder of SkillMind, which is an AI platform for private banks.
00:06:17 Lofred Madzou
And I'm also one of the co-founders of the African Olympiad Academy, which is a regional high school based in Kigali that trains the top STEM talents on the African continent.
00:06:27 Lofred Madzou
I spent just a year at OI, my MSC, a while ago in 2015,
00:06:31 Lofred Madzou
but it has been actually one of the most important years of my life.
00:06:34 Lofred Madzou
And I'm back to AI as a board advisor.
00:06:37 Veena McCoole
How has the way you think about tech and its impact on society shifted since 2016 to now, 10 years on?
00:06:44 Lofred Madzou
I have a much deeper understanding of the impact of technology, especially AI in society because of my time at AI.
00:06:52 Lofred Madzou
One thing I need to kind of mention as well is that's that OI that I got into philosophy.
00:06:57 Lofred Madzou
I started to understand that this whole idea of building machines able to perform human tasks has a very, very long roads.
00:07:05 Lofred Madzou
And once you start to understand what are these roots, what are the implicit applications about what are we as human beings, what it means to be a human being, what it means to perform a task, what it means to acquire a skill.
00:07:18 Lofred Madzou
And you get into this world where you realize that you have hundreds of years of thinking around this.
00:07:25 Lofred Madzou
It's become a very, very, very powerful toolbox to understand what's going on now.
00:07:29 Lofred Madzou
It gives you depth.
00:07:30 Lofred Madzou
I really want to insist on this.
00:07:31 Lofred Madzou
AI gave me a lot of depth.
00:07:33 Lofred Madzou
And as I was advising governments on how to think about AI, I was relying a lot on what I learned at the AI and specifically in philosophy.
00:07:42 Lofred Madzou
I'm a deep, deep, deep fan.
00:07:45 Lofred Madzou
I would say like a student of Hubert Dreyfus, who was a famous philosopher, professor at Berkeley, one of the biggest critique of AI back in the days.
00:07:55 Lofred Madzou
So I'm really deep into the terminology.
00:07:57 Lofred Madzou
Why I'm stressing this is that you cannot think technology is in relation to society.
00:08:02 Lofred Madzou
It's always a byproduct of society.
00:08:04 Lofred Madzou
And it goes both ways.
00:08:06 Lofred Madzou
Obviously, we shape our technologies, but they shape us.
00:08:09 Lofred Madzou
It raises really fundamental questions about what it means to be us as human beings, what it means to have a job, what it means to have a career, how it impacts society, how it impacts education, meaning a school.
00:08:21 Lofred Madzou
What is education in the age of AI?
00:08:23 Lofred Madzou
All of these questions, I'm always relying on what I learned at OI to articulate them and hopefully provide meaningful answers.
00:08:30 Veena McCoole
Yeah, that's incredible.
00:08:31 Veena McCoole
I mean, so few people will think about the OII as a place of philosophy, but it seems like that's the lens that has shaped a lot of your thinking, even as you've gone on to work in tech, which is great.
00:08:43 Lofred Madzou
When you think about technology, often people are really caught up into the capabilities, right?
00:08:49 Lofred Madzou
So what can you do with AI, which is really, really important, right?
00:08:53 Lofred Madzou
But also in the same breath, you need to ask yourself what you should do with AI.
00:08:57 Lofred Madzou
And I'm stressing philosophy because that's my passion, but frankly, broadly, it's more like a social science domain, right?
00:09:02 Lofred Madzou
Obviously, history, obviously, political science, economy, all of these social sciences have a lot to contribute to addressing these questions.
00:09:11 Lofred Madzou
What made OI stood out is that you had enough exposure to a technical underpinnings of this technology.
00:09:17 Lofred Madzou
OI was one of the only places where you could do both.
00:09:20 Lofred Madzou
You could understand how it works
00:09:23 Lofred Madzou
and how it should be used?
00:09:25 Heather Ford
My name is Heather Ford.
00:09:26 Heather Ford
I'm a professor in the School of Communication at the University of Technology Sydney and I spent three years at the OII.
00:09:36 Heather Ford
I have continued a lot of the work that I started at the OII with my DPhil.
00:09:42 Heather Ford
I studied
00:09:44 Heather Ford
how Wikipedians construct knowledge and truth on the encyclopedia collectively, looking mostly at articles that were written in the continent of Africa, where I'm from.
00:09:57 Heather Ford
That work has continued.
00:09:58 Heather Ford
I'm running a big project that should be completed this year that looked at how English Wikipedia represents Australian people, places, and historic events called Wiki histories.
00:10:11 Heather Ford
So yeah, we've been looking at representation on Wikipedia, issues of bias and how that flows through to artificial intelligence and other platforms.
00:10:22 Heather Ford
I'm also working on a new project around AI in libraries and what critical AI literacy means for Australian citizens.
00:10:34 Heather Ford
So.
00:10:35 Heather Ford
a lot of the same themes.
00:10:36 Heather Ford
I was always interested in knowledge technologies and I've kind of expanded from my work on Wikipedia to look at other kinds of platforms where knowledge is being constructed online.
00:10:47 Veena McCoole
Amazing.
00:10:48 Veena McCoole
Sounds really interesting and timely.
00:10:50 Veena McCoole
And you were at the OII back from 2012 to 2015.
00:10:54 Veena McCoole
How did that time shape the direction of your career?
00:10:58 Heather Ford
It was...
00:11:00 Heather Ford
a pretty unique and amazing experience actually that you only recognize fully after you've left because I don't think there are any other institutes of the internet that are entirely dedicated to studying the internet and I grew up and became an internet activist in the early 2000s
00:11:27 Heather Ford
And I was really passionate about the internet and all the promise of the internet.
00:11:30 Heather Ford
So studying internet cultures and politics at an institute that was completely dedicated to internet culture was really unique and incredible.
00:11:43 Heather Ford
And that really shaped my thinking.
00:11:45 Heather Ford
The work that I've since done has always been super interdisciplinary.
00:11:49 Heather Ford
I've worked with geographers and information systems people, people from computer science.
00:11:55 Heather Ford
and anthropologists.
00:11:56 Heather Ford
And I think that love of both the internet and of the interdisciplinary nature of research on the internet has really carried through to my current work.
00:12:05 Veena McCoole
We're so happy to hear that.
00:12:07 Veena McCoole
And things have changed so much with the advent of AI since the internet began.
00:12:12 Veena McCoole
I wonder, has the way you kind of think about technology and its impact on society shifted and evolved since your time at the OAI?
00:12:22 Heather Ford
I mean, I actually don't think that things have changed that much.
00:12:28 Heather Ford
I was actually talking about this to a colleague of mine earlier, and we were talking about the early 2000s and the big promise of the internet and how exciting the internet felt in those early days.
00:12:43 Heather Ford
But even in those early days, I think
00:12:47 Heather Ford
We recognized that the internet wasn't representative of everyone and that it was being developed with a really specific mindset, a really specific logic that came out of a very particular place, i.e.
00:13:01 Heather Ford
Silicon Valley.
00:13:03 Heather Ford
And even in those early days, it wasn't perfect.
00:13:08 Heather Ford
And I think it's those elements of the internet that we kind of saw in really small ways in those early days
00:13:16 Heather Ford
That has made it such a difficult and challenging place these days.
00:13:23 Heather Ford
So yes, I think it's different, but I don't think the jump, the AI jump is as significant as I think we sometimes think it is.
00:13:31 Heather Ford
I think these changes have been coming for a while, but yes, things feel very different.
00:13:37 Heather Ford
As they were in like 2003, I guess when I first really seriously started
00:13:42 Heather Ford
working on internet politics.
00:13:44 Maknoon Wani
My name is Makhnoon Vani.
00:13:46 Maknoon Wani
I was in Oxford in the session 23-24.
00:13:51 Maknoon Wani
Currently, I'm working in Google Trust and Safety as a policy specialist.
00:13:56 Maknoon Wani
I particularly work on policies related to elections.
00:14:00 Maknoon Wani
I also work on brand impersonation, impersonation of public figures.
00:14:05 Maknoon Wani
I also work on hacking, underground markets, and other subversive activities on the internet.
00:14:11 Veena McCoole
And how did your time at the OII shape the direction that your career has taken?
00:14:15 Maknoon Wani
Once I went to OII, I met people from different sectors.
00:14:19 Maknoon Wani
It was a very diverse cohort.
00:14:21 Maknoon Wani
Some people were from social sectors, some people had already worked in governments, some people were also from the private sector.
00:14:28 Maknoon Wani
So during tutorials and different lectures and offline, online conversations I had with people there, I understood the scope of work in
00:14:38 Maknoon Wani
the social sciences of the internet and how people work in all of these sectors and that actually broadened my horizon and I know I started to look at different fields that I can join once I'm done with the masters.
00:14:52 Maknoon Wani
It was a very balanced curriculum in the sense that it talked about technology, regulation, social sciences research on tech, but it also gave you enough understanding of how the internet works in terms of logistics, technical side of the things.
00:15:08 Maknoon Wani
For example, we had a course on subversive technologies where we were taught about underground markets, the deep web, the dark web.
00:15:16 Maknoon Wani
We were also taught about social engineering and how that leads to scams.
00:15:21 Maknoon Wani
sort of understand the technical side of the things that really helped me to understand like how abuse is happening online and how we can tackle it.
00:15:30 Maknoon Wani
And the way I do my own research in the current job, it's like majorly informed by how we were taught to do that during the course.
00:15:39 Veena McCoole
Maknun Wani, Heather Ford, and Lofred Manzu, giving, I think, a sense of the different perspectives that the OI brings together to study the internet, technology, and society.
00:15:49 Veena McCoole
Our final group of alumni have all gone on to very different careers following their time at the OII, but once again bring a sense of the breadth of study and also the connections that they made at Oxford.
00:15:59 Joey D'Urso
My name is Joey Durso.
00:16:00 Joey D'Urso
I'm now a freelance journalist and author.
00:16:03 Joey D'Urso
I recently published my first book, which is More Than A Shirt, How Football Shirts Explain Global Politics, Money and Power.
00:16:08 Joey D'Urso
I'm already working on a second out next year.
00:16:09 Joey D'Urso
And I was at the OII for two years.
00:16:11 Joey D'Urso
I did an MSc, but I did it part-time.
00:16:14 Joey D'Urso
So it was like during COVID, so 2020 to 2022.
00:16:17 Veena McCoole
And how did your time at the OII shape the direction your career has taken?
00:16:21 Joey D'Urso
Well, definitely in a big way, because I did lots of statistics.
00:16:25 Joey D'Urso
I did lots of the sort of more quantitative side of things.
00:16:27 Joey D'Urso
And I quickly got a job fairly soon after at the Times, the Times of London, as a senior data journalist.
00:16:34 Joey D'Urso
And that massively helped me.
00:16:35 Joey D'Urso
I would never have got that job without my education in statistics at the OII.
00:16:39 Joey D'Urso
And then I sort of, I guess, went in a slightly different direction after that.
00:16:42 Joey D'Urso
That was definitely a really important part of who I am today and what I'm working on.
00:16:45 Joey D'Urso
So yeah, I'm very grateful to the OAI for that.
00:16:48 Veena McCoole
And I wonder if the way you think about tech and how it impacts society, if that's shifted or evolved since you were at the OAI.
00:16:55 Joey D'Urso
Yeah, well, I suppose I was there just before like LLMs.
00:16:59 Joey D'Urso
So AI was this sort of slightly abstract thing.
00:17:01 Joey D'Urso
I'm not sure I quite grasped what it was.
00:17:03 Joey D'Urso
I think, you know, we were all talking about it.
00:17:05 Joey D'Urso
It's really interesting and the kind of teaching and everything was great, but it was all like something that done by companies, something done by Meta and Google.
00:17:12 Joey D'Urso
It wasn't something that like individual consumers were involved in at all.
00:17:16 Joey D'Urso
And that came like, I guess if I finish in the summer of 22, it was very soon after that.
00:17:20 Joey D'Urso
So yeah, that's a huge shift is from AI being something used by companies and experts to something used by ordinary people.
00:17:27 Veena McCoole
And earlier you mentioned that the focus on statistics and the technical elements of what you studied at OII really helped you secure that first job.
00:17:35 Veena McCoole
I wonder if there are.
00:17:36 Veena McCoole
Any other skills or experiences you can point to that influenced your work?
00:17:40 Joey D'Urso
Yeah, so it was my first show.
00:17:41 Joey D'Urso
I spent like several years as a political journalist, but that sort of hard data side of things was definitely new to me.
00:17:46 Joey D'Urso
Yeah, I'd say the main one is certainly the quantitative stuff.
00:17:49 Joey D'Urso
That's what really sticks in my mind.
00:17:51 Joey D'Urso
Other skills and experiences.
00:17:52 Joey D'Urso
I mean, I guess the sort of hard research, like writing a thesis, that probably helped me a lot when I came to write a book, which was even longer, but just that level of kind of focus, which I hadn't in my Oxford undergrad, I never wrote anything more than like 2000 words long.
00:18:03 Joey D'Urso
So
00:18:04 Joey D'Urso
having the discipline to write something a lot longer and think carefully about structuring it was definitely really helpful for writing a book eventually.
00:18:10 Zoe Jay Hawkins
My name is Zoe Jay Hawkins.
00:18:11 Zoe Jay Hawkins
I'm co-founder at the Tech Policy Design Institute in Australia, and I was lucky enough to spend one year at the OAI.
00:18:17 Zoe Jay Hawkins
My time at the OAI, I think, just reinforced something that I hold to be really true and valuable in the work that I do now at the Tech Policy Design Institute.
00:18:25 Zoe Jay Hawkins
Think tank work is really about bringing that intersection of different perspectives and topics together.
00:18:30 Zoe Jay Hawkins
And I think that is something I found
00:18:33 Zoe Jay Hawkins
an experience I had at the OII was the diversity of topics that people are working on.
00:18:37 Zoe Jay Hawkins
I think when you say, the intersection of tech and society, that can sound like a niche area, but at least when I was there, within my cohort, we had everybody looking at, I was looking at the power relationship and foreign policy dynamic between governments and big tech companies, but we had other people who were looking at, the role of social media and climate change activism through to people looking at, the role of surveillance and drone technologies in conflict zones, right?
00:19:03 Zoe Jay Hawkins
the breadth of topics that can exist even under what seems like a bit of a niche roof.
00:19:07 Zoe Jay Hawkins
So you certainly learn a lot about from your peers, definitely.
00:19:14 Veena McCoole
Yeah, that's so interesting.
00:19:15 Veena McCoole
Tech in society kind of sounds niche initially, but actually can mean so.
00:19:20 Zoe Jay Hawkins
Look, as a co-founder of the Tech Policy Design Institute, tech policy sounds like the niche lane, but I can guarantee you it's basically all public policy.
00:19:31 Zoe Jay Hawkins
And one of the things that we really believe in, and I think the OAI is a perfect example of, is it's really hard to find a policy issue that doesn't have a technology angle.
00:19:39 Zoe Jay Hawkins
So you almost take any policy issue, if it's from health through to education,
00:19:44 Zoe Jay Hawkins
and AI right now, you kind of can't find a part of policymaking that doesn't intersect with tech.
00:19:50 Zoe Jay Hawkins
And so, you know, equipping ourselves and our decision makers with the confidence and capability to understand that intersection between policy and technology and to do it well is a big job.
00:20:03 Veena McCoole
Moving on to the people you encountered at the department, the OAI is known for the networks and relationships that it fosters.
00:20:10 Veena McCoole
And I'm curious if any of those connections have continued to play a role
00:20:14 Veena McCoole
role in your personal life or your career?
00:20:17 Zoe Jay Hawkins
The people are 100% one of the best parts of being at the OAI and you're right to split it in between both the professional side of that and the personal.
00:20:26 Zoe Jay Hawkins
So aside from the fact that I am still in touch with some really incredible friends through my experience and time as a student at the OAI, I was fortunate to kind of harness some of the opportunities while I was at the OAI to sort of convert that into
00:20:42 Zoe Jay Hawkins
an ongoing research relationship with the Institute.
00:20:46 Zoe Jay Hawkins
So lucky enough to have been a research associate with the OAI off the back of being there for my MSc in Social Science of the Internet.
00:20:54 Zoe Jay Hawkins
And the people that I did that with are incredible.
00:20:56 Zoe Jay Hawkins
So I've been working with Professor Billy Ladenberta and Boshi Wu, who we as a writing trio have actually, you know, I think it's been three years now since I left the OAI and we still are essentially academic pen pals publishing papers together and
00:21:11 Zoe Jay Hawkins
have been fortunate to, our work has focused on the geopolitics of AI and cloud computing infrastructure around the world.
00:21:20 Zoe Jay Hawkins
And through these connections that I made at the OAI, we've published academically, but also that research has really translated across into the policy and media community.
00:21:29 Zoe Jay Hawkins
And we've actually managed to get traction with outlets, including the New York Times and Time Magazine and The Economist with some of that research.
00:21:36 Zoe Jay Hawkins
So it's been really incredible to, I guess, bridge that academic and
00:21:41 Zoe Jay Hawkins
policy and media impact world with connections that I made at the OAI.
00:21:45 Carl Ohman
My name is Karl Aman and I'm an associate professor of political science at Uppsala University.
00:21:51 Carl Ohman
I spent four years at the OAI.
00:21:54 Veena McCoole
And what have you been working on since leaving the OAI?
00:21:58 Carl Ohman
So the first job I applied to upon leaving the OAI was this tenure track assistant professor position in Uppsala.
00:22:08 Carl Ohman
It was on AI and political communication.
00:22:11 Carl Ohman
And it's funny because I didn't consider myself working either on AI or political communication.
00:22:17 Carl Ohman
But it was five years of full funding for research and two PhD students.
00:22:24 Carl Ohman
So I called my dad, who's a professor, and I was like, should I?
00:22:28 Carl Ohman
Do you think I should apply?
00:22:29 Carl Ohman
And he was like, yeah, of course.
00:22:30 Carl Ohman
What are you waiting for?
00:22:32 Carl Ohman
And both the external reviewers for the position was like spot on AI and political communication.
00:22:39 Carl Ohman
And I'm still on that funding.
00:22:40 Carl Ohman
So I'm six years now from leaving the OII, but two of those have been on parental leave.
00:22:47 Veena McCoole
And has the way you kind of think about technology and its impact on society shifted or evolved since your time at the OII?
00:22:54 Veena McCoole
And if so, how?
00:22:57 Carl Ohman
It would be an understatement to say that it shifted.
00:23:00 Carl Ohman
I don't
00:23:01 Carl Ohman
necessarily think that I had a very sophisticated understanding of technology and society before I came to the OII.
00:23:09 Carl Ohman
I had a double major bachelor's degree in comparative literature and sociology.
00:23:15 Carl Ohman
And I had written both of my bachelor thesis on digital technology.
00:23:21 Carl Ohman
But I mean, there was no one at my department who knew the first thing about technology.
00:23:27 Carl Ohman
So I'd never actually engaged
00:23:30 Carl Ohman
with the field.
00:23:32 Carl Ohman
So it's almost difficult comparing before and after.
00:23:37 Carl Ohman
In my case, it's almost asking like, has education changed your view of the world?
00:23:44 Carl Ohman
It's like before you enter education, you're basically a child, you know nothing of the world.
00:23:49 Carl Ohman
And once you exit your education, you're an adult.
00:23:53 Carl Ohman
And I sort of feel that way with the OII that I was known before I entered.
00:24:00 Carl Ohman
And now I am someone.
00:24:01 Carl Ohman
We have a really old professor at my department who is sort of like, almost like the founding figure of political science in Sweden.
00:24:10 Carl Ohman
He's born in the same small town that I am.
00:24:14 Carl Ohman
And I heard him got the question once like, Oh, Leif, you're from Orebru.
00:24:20 Carl Ohman
And he turned and he said, Yes, but I was born when I came to Uppsala.
00:24:27 Carl Ohman
And I
00:24:28 Carl Ohman
I have a similar relationship to Oxford that, I'm from Sweden, but I was born, at least as a thinker, when I came to Oxford.
00:24:38 Veena McCoole
Well, you can't get a better endorsement than that.
00:24:40 Veena McCoole
Carl Oman, now at Uppsala University, author Joey Durso, and Zoe J.
00:24:45 Veena McCoole
Hawkins at the Tech Policy Design Institute in Australia.
00:24:49 Veena McCoole
Thank you so much to them and to all our guests for sharing their experiences at Oxford.
00:24:54 Veena McCoole
Before we go, here are some birthday messages.
00:24:57 Carl Ohman
The first thing I just want to say is thanks for everything.
00:25:00 Carl Ohman
Maybe the second thing is I'm coming back.
00:25:04 Carl Ohman
Not necessarily permanently.
00:25:06 Carl Ohman
I couldn't live in the UK, but it's now been, I think, at least three years since I visited DOI.
00:25:14 Carl Ohman
And it's just way, way too long.
00:25:17 Carla Intal
Keep up the good work.
00:25:19 Carla Intal
Thank you for shaping us all like social data scientists and internet researchers.
00:25:24 Carla Intal
I think
00:25:25 Carla Intal
The institute has done a great job in really producing great research and people who are very much well embedded in the field of technology.
00:25:35 Carla Intal
And we really also hope to make the OII proud as we embark into the world, right?
00:25:41 Carla Intal
So yeah, congratulations and maybe 25 plus more years to come.
00:25:46 Megha Mishra
I think I'd like to say a big thank you, not just for the education, but for a space that OII is, which is very interdisciplinary.
00:25:53 Megha Mishra
You meet technologists and you meet SSS together, and then you merge them together and see what comes out of it.
00:25:59 Megha Mishra
I don't think there's another place like OII in the whole world, and I'm so honored to have been a part of this journey.
00:26:04 Zoe Jay Hawkins
Well, I think the obvious one is thank you.
00:26:06 Zoe Jay Hawkins
It's been incredible to be there and to continue to be part of the alumni network.
00:26:11 Zoe Jay Hawkins
But I actually think it's really to say
00:26:14 Zoe Jay Hawkins
I want to see the next 25 years.
00:26:16 Zoe Jay Hawkins
I think what's really important is that the OAI continues to evolve and have its impact and research get out there as the intersection between technology and society just becomes more intertwined, more important.
00:26:29 Zoe Jay Hawkins
The OAI's work is only going to increase in importance.
00:26:32 Zoe Jay Hawkins
And so I'll be watching this space to see what it does next.
00:26:34 Heather Ford
It makes me really happy that we still have an Oxford Internet Institute that's really dedicated
00:26:41 Heather Ford
to answering these big questions and to holding the internet to account and remembering that the internet that we were promised is still an internet that we can have in the future.
00:26:55 Joey D'Urso
It's a special place and it's an exciting place.
00:26:57 Joey D'Urso
It's only going to get kind of more important in the world.
00:26:59 Joey D'Urso
Big up the OII.
00:27:01 Joey D'Urso
Happy birthday.
00:27:02 Veena McCoole
So here's to the next 25 years.
00:27:05 Veena McCoole
I hope you've enjoyed this season of the Human Interface podcast.
00:27:07 Veena McCoole
We'll be back soon.
00:27:09 Veena McCoole
If you're enjoying what we're putting out, please like, share, or tell your friends about us.
00:27:13 Veena McCoole
I'm Veena McCool.
00:27:14 Veena McCoole
Additional production has been by Boffin Media for the OII.
00:27:17 Veena McCoole
Thanks for listening.