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Cyberscholar Working Group at MIT

October 24, 2014 at 5PM
MIT Center for Civic Media (3rd floor)
MIT Building E14 Room 240
Cambridge, MA 02139

The Cyberscholar Working Group is a forum for fellows and affiliates of MIT, Yale Law School Information Society Project, Columbia University, NYU, and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University to discuss their ongoing research. Each session is focused on the peer review and discussion of current projects submitted by a presenter. Meeting alternatively at Harvard, MIT, Yale, NYU, and Columbia, the working group aims to expand the shared knowledge of young scholars by bringing together these preeminent centers of thought on issues confronting the information age. Discussion sessions are designed to facilitate advancements in the individual research of presenters and in turn encourage exposure among the participants to the multi-disciplinary features of the issues addressed by their own work.

This month's presentations include:

Kendra Albert presenting on Video Game Servers and DMCA 1201
As part of an upcoming filing with the Copyright Office, I’m exploring the complicated relationship between digital rights management like technological protection mechanisms, copyrighted works, game communities and archiving. To put it simply:  the very tools that allow game sales to thrive can be used to prevent game communities from being able to outlast game shutdowns, and may keep archivists and preservation experts from being able to preserve copies for posterity.

Ramesh Subramanian presenting on The Evolution of ICT in the Indian Railway System
The Indian Railways is one of the world’s largest railway networks. It comprises about 115,000 kilometers of tracks, of which the total route is about 65,000 kilometers. It is the largest railway enterprise that is run by a single management – that being the government of India. In terms of the number of passengers served per day and per year, it probably ranks the highest. In the year 2011-2012 alone it served about nine billion passengers – about 24 million passengers every day. The origins of this system were conceived by the British as early as 1832, and the first tracks became operational in 1853, under Lord Dalhousie’s oversight. In this evolving project, I study the evolution of ICTs in the Indian Railway system extending from its earliest days of existence to the present.  ICTs in this context pertain to signaling, telecommunications, organizational computing from the 1960s onwards, and the expansion of computer-based services from the 1980s.

Sands Fish presenting on Media Landscape Networks.

 
Past Event
Oct 24, 2014
Time
5:00 PM - 7:00 PM