Story ideas

This is the most important part of the application.

Please write three ideas for reports on the automatization of society in Europe. The idea should contain:

The topic to report on (make sure to highlight what is being automated or is believed to be automated).
The methodology for the report.

We will review your story ideas along three criteria: 1) Whether it is about the automatization of society, 2) whether the methodology is appropriate to answer the research question and 3) that your written English is at the B2 level.

We understand that you might not want to share a good lead with us. Feel free to change the names of the companies or countries your actual story is about.

Our understanding of the automatization of society includes:

algorithms deployed in the fields of police, justice administration, care, education, energy provision, welfare distribution, etc.
the impact of automated systems on daily life, for instance routing systems sending traffic on restricted roads, a social network’s algorithm that restricts the visibility of some users, automated translation engines that make systematic errors etc. Or the perception of algorithms by the general population, even if these perceptions are not based in fact.
the ecosystem that allows for the deployment of automated systems, for instance how training data sets are built and maintained, how academics might be wooed by Big Tech, how politicians attempt to regulate the field etc.

Topics that are not relevant to the automatization of society include:

reviews of products (e.g. “here is why GPT-12 will change how we communicate”)
high-level analyses of a technology (e.g. “is AI good or bad?”)
reports on automation in an industrial context (e.g. “how the port of Hamburg is automating container management”). However, industrial automation often spills over into society at large, by impacting work schedules, power relations between employer and employee etc. It is all about the angle of the reporting.

Examples for story ideas:

Automated translation engines have sexist biases and do not correctly translate female occupations from one gender-inflected language to the next (e.g. "Fahrerin" is translated as "conducteur"). I will test a dozen professions between 5 gender-inflected languages in Google and Bing Translate.
Small consultancies pretend to have cracked TikTok's "For you" algorithm and offer to help you improve your TikTok game (for a fee). I will review their claims and find out if they hold any water. And if not, I'll research why some people are falling for it.
A far-right party in Italy wants to create an algorithm to automatically match people out of university with job offers. I will review their proposal and check whether it's that different from other attempts to "solve" unemployment with Artificial Intelligence.

Apply to the AlgorithmWatch fellowship in algorithmic accountability reporting