The aim of the thesis is to evaluate recent work in artificial intelligence (AI). It is argued that such evaluation can be philosophically interesting, and examples are given of areas of the philosophy of AI where insufficient concentration on the actual results of AI has led to missed opportunities for the two disciplines — philosophy and AI — to benefit from cross-fertilization. The particular topic of the thesis is the use of AI techniques in psychological explanation. The claim is that such techniques can be of value in psychology, and the strategy of proof is to exhibit an area where this is the case. The field of model-based knowledge-based system (KBS) development is outlined; a type of model called a conceptual model will be shown to be psychologically explanatory of the expertise that it models.

A group of major philosophies of explanation are examined, and it is discovered that such philosophies are too restrictive and prescriptive to be of much value in evaluating many areas of science; they fail to apply to scientific explanation generally. The importance of having sympathetic yardsticks for the evaluation of explanatory practices in arbitrary fields is defended, and a series of such yardsticks is suggested. The practice of providing information processing models in psychology is discussed.

A particular type of model, a psychological competence model, is defined, and its use in psychological explanation defended. It is then shown that conceptual models used in model-based KBS development are psychological competence models. It follows therefore that such models are explanatory of the expertise they model. Furthermore, since KBSs developed using conceptual models share many structural characteristics with their conceptual models, it follows that a limited class of those systems are also explanatory of expertise. This constitutes an existence proof that computational processes can be explanatory of mental processes.

Likening contemporary extremes of far-right populism and identity politics to 17th century Peasants and Puritans, Blockchain Politics examines the enduring importance of trust in political life. Kieron O’Hara develops a new theory of trust to analyse how these extremes undermine social accord and weaken representative democracy, and to suggest remedies.

The Dictionary of Privacy, Data Protection and Information Security explains the complex technical terms, legal concepts, privacy management techniques, conceptual matters and vocabulary that inform public debate about privacy.

The revolutionary and pervasive influence of digital technology affects numerous disciplines and sectors of society, and concerns about its potential threats to privacy are growing. With over a thousand terms meticulously set out, described and cross-referenced, this Dictionary enables productive discussion by covering the full range of fields accessibly and comprehensively. In the ever-evolving debate surrounding privacy, this Dictionary takes a longer view, transcending the details of today’s problems, technology, and the law to examine the wider principles that underlie privacy discourse.

Interdisciplinary in scope, this Dictionary is invaluable to students, scholars and researchers in law, technology and computing, cybersecurity, sociology, public policy and administration, and regulation. It is also a vital reference for diverse practitioners including data scientists, lawyers, policymakers and regulators.

The De-Identification Decision-Making Framework is an adaptation to the Australian context of the
UK resource The Anonymisation Decision-Making Framework, and is the result of a close
collaboration of CSIRO and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, with input from
the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. The
adaptation has required revisions due to differences in the legal frameworks, the use of Australian
examples and terminology, and minimal additional changes.

The need for well-thought-out anonymisation has never been more acute. The drive to share data has led to some ill-conceived, poorly-anonymised data publications including the Netflix, AOL, and New York taxi cases, underlining how important it is to carry out anonymisation properly and what can happen if you do not.

UKAN publishes the Anonymisation Decision Making Framework (ADF) to address a need for a practical guide to GDPR-compliant anonymisation that gives more operational advice than other publications such as the UK Information Commissioner’s Office’s (ICO) valuable Anonymisation Code of Practice. At the same time, we are concerned to be less technical and forbidding than the existing statistics and computer science literature.

The Guide is primarily intended for those who have microdata that they need to anonymise with confidence, typically in order to share it for some purpose in some form compliant with GDPR and the UK Data Protection Act (2018). Our aim is to furnish practical understanding of anonymisation so you can utilise it to advance your business or organisational goals. The Guide comes with some specific tools and templates to capture and evaluate your data situation and these we hope should help render most problems more tractable. The ADF is designed to control the risk of unintended re-identification and disclosure, and therefore its principles are universally applicable.

The book is intended to be organic and we will be updating it periodically. We welcome comments on the book at any time. Just email your thoughts to: [email protected]. Note: we will regularly update the templates and tools available below. For the latest version always use the the standalone template rather than the one in the book itself.

Understanding the Web is a problem on a par with other complex scientific challenges such as climate change or the human genome. The requirement for understanding should ideally be accompanied by some measure of control, which makes Web Science crucial in the future provision of tools for managing our interactions, our politics, our economics, our entertainment, and — not least — our knowledge and data sharing. The Web is a critical infrastructure that underpins increasingly many of our transactions, and yet is barely understood by policymakers.

This monograph considers the development of Web Science since the publication of A Framework for Web Science (2006). The theme of emergence is discussed as the characteristic phenomenon of Web-scale applications, where many unrelated micro-level actions and decisions, uninformed by knowledge about the macro-level, still produce noticeable and coherent effects at the scale of the Web. A model of emergence is mapped onto the multitheoretical multilevel (MTML) model of communication networks explained by Monge and Contractor. Four specific types of theoretical problem are outlined. First, there is the need to explain local action. Second, the global patterns that form when local actions are repeated at scale have to be detected and understood. Third, those patterns feed back into the local, with intricate and often fleeting causal connections to be traced. Finally, as Web Science is an engineering discipline, issues of control of this feedback must be addressed. The idea of a social machine is introduced, where networked interactions at scale can help to achieve goals for people and social groups in civic society; an important aim of Web Science is to understand how such networks can operate, and how they can control the effects they produce on their own environment.

Web Science explains the motivating issues for Web Science. It shows not only how research has addressed the gap between the micro-level processes and the macro-level Web-scale phenomena to which they give rise but also why research is still needed to do that.

Author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception, and inventor of the term ‘psychedelic’, Aldous Huxley was a global trend-setter ahead of his time. In this study Dr Kieron O’Hara explores the life of this great visionary, charting his transformation from society satirist to Californian guru-mystic through an insightful analysis of his life’s work. Combining thoughtful biography, easy-to-use reading notes, and an insightful exploration of Huxley’s continuing legacy, Huxley: A Beginner’s Guide is the definitive introduction to one of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers.

Kieron O’Hara gives a new account of what ‘conservative’ actually means, refashioning the traditional conservative philosophy for a modern age. He draws on the works of thinkers such as Edmund Burke and Adam Smith, philosophers from Plato to Ludwig Wittgenstein, and today’s social commentators such as Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Jared Diamond.

The real meaning of ‘conservative’ – today denoting groups as diverse and incompatible as the religious right, libertarian free-marketeers and free-spending neo-conservatives – has been lost to politics. Yet the original conservative ideology, first developed in the eighteenth century by Edmund Burke, was concerned with managing change. Kieron O’Hara argues that genuine conservatism has its own relevance in a complex and dynamic world where change is rapid, pervasive and dislocating. Conservatism transcends traditional politics, and has surprising applications – not least as the most appropriate and practical response to climate change.

Kieron O’Hara’s Conservatism is a revision for the modern age of the traditional conservative philosophy. It shows what a properly conservative ideology looks like and demonstrates that many self-styled ‘conservatives’ actually promote destructive change in their own and others’ societies. Drawing on great conservative thinkers such as Burke and Adam Smith, philosophers ancient and modern from Plato to Wittgenstein, and contemporary social commentators including Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Ulrich Beck and Jared Diamond, this new and strikingly original theory of conservative philosophy lays bare our lack of understanding of our own societies, and shows how risk pervades society and how it should be managed. It also proves that conservatism is distinct from neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism and the extreme positions of today’s ‘culture warriors’. O’Hara shows how conservatism is an ideology sensitive to cultural differences between the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, East Asia and elsewhere, while highlighting the issues of technology, trust and privacy. Conservatism will appeal to anyone interested in the history – and future – of political philosophy and social thought.

Blamed for the bloody disasters of the 20th century: Auschwitz, the Gulags, globalisation, Islamic terrorism; heralded as the harbinger of reason, equality, and the end of arbitrary rule, the Enlightenment has been nothing if not divisive. To this day historians disagree over when it was, where it was, and what it was (and sometimes, still is). Kieron O’Hara deftly traverses these conflicts, presenting the history, politics, science, religion, arts, and social life of the Enlightenment not as a simple set of easily enumerated ideas, but an evolving conglomerate that spawned a very diverse set of thinkers, from the radical Rousseau to the conservative Burke.

We are entering a new state of global hypersurveillance. As we increasingly resort to technology for our work and play, our electronic activity leaves behind digital footprints that can be used to track our movements. In our cars, telephones, even our coffee machines, tiny computers communicating wirelessly via the Internet can serve as miniature witnesses, forming powerful networks whose emergent behaviour can be very complex, intelligent, and invasive. The question is: how much of an infringement on privacy are they? Exposing the invasion of our privacy from CCTVs to blogs, The Spy in the Coffee Machine explores what—if anything—we can do to prevent it from disappearing forever in the digital age, and provides readers with a much needed wake-up call to the benefits and dangers of this new technology.