What can machines know about the mind, even theoretically? This dissertation examines what people (end-users and software engineers) believe the answer to this question might be, where these beliefs come from, and what effect they have on social behavior and technical practice. First, qualitative and quantitative data from controlled experiments show how basic biosignals, such as heartrate, meet with both social context and prior beliefs about the body to produce mind-related meanings, and affect social decision-making. Second, a working brain-computer interface probes the diverse beliefs that software engineers hold about the mind, and uncovers their shared belief that the mind can and will be read by machines. These cases trace an unstable boundary–one heavily mediated by human beliefs–between sensing bodies and sensing minds. I propose the porousness of this boundary as a site for studying the futures of computer-mediated communication, of security, privacy and surveillance, and of minds themselves.

This dissertation investigates social biosensing: the sharing of physiological information between people, particularly through the lens of empathy and related interpersonal psychological processes. Self-tracking is the the collection and sharing of physiological information about oneself and has been a focus in academic research, but a next step in the use of this data, particularly in an era of communication at a distance, is sharing it with others. Research prototypes and already in-the-wild devices and applications designed for social biosensing are indicative of the shift in attention beyond the individual. Using a mixed quantitative and qualitative research methodology, this dissertation describes three research studies which build on one another to fill in gaps present in the current understanding of the underlying effects of social biosensing. This work seeks to provide answers to questions including: What is the measurable effect of social biosensing on one's accuracy in predicting another's internal states, what impact does social biosensing have on measures of closeness and humanization compared to other information types, and how do people form meanings of unfamiliar biosensory information in a social world. Chapters 1 and 2 cover the introduction and background to this emerging area of research as well as the mixed methods used in the covered studies. The subsequent three chapters detail results from original research, Studies 1, 2, and 3, respectively, conducted in three primary areas related to social biosensing: empathic accuracy, empathic precursors and interpersonal perceptions, and finally intersubjective meaning-making. Studies 1 and 2 report on the first ever experimental studies quantitatively assessing valence and arousal empathic accuracy with social biosensing. Study 3 uniquely implements the concept of intersubjectivity in an analysis of physically separated friends' understanding of social biosensing. Chapter 6 concludes with a broader discussion of these findings across studies, opportunities for continued research, and implications for theorists, researchers, and developers of social biosensing systems.

In aggregate, the results of this work suggest different strengths for biosensory information (in the form of electrodermal activity or EDA) compared to descriptive narration information for observers interpretations of a target's inner states. Narration information resulted in observers more accurately inferring the target's valence extremes - for positive events in Study 1, and negative events in Study 2, perhaps because it is closest to forms of typical communication through speech and text. However, the observers who received narration information did not perform well relative to observers in other conditions when inferring a target's arousal in Study 2, actually performing significantly worse than observers who received no additional information when inferring the target's relaxed events. Observers who received EDA information on the other hand significantly outperformed narration and no information observers when interpreting the target's most relaxed events, suggesting that EDA information, a physiological signal with ties to emotional arousal, may help observers infer this other dimension of emotion in a target person. Qualitative findings were more abstract than these specific quantitative metrics, coalescing instead around EDA providing a sense of the target’s existence for observers, and a reminder of the target’s unique perspective as different from their own. Regardless of accuracy outcomes, the mere presence of the target's EDA as a moving graph seemed to be enough to indicate the target’s existence and experience. Findings from Study 3, which further investigated the meaning-making process around EDA, indicated the relevance of both ecological and radical intersubjectivity approaches such that meanings can be formed through projecting one's understanding of one's own data onto another's, and also through dialogue about this new data type with close others. Furthermore, a set of temporal typologies emerged from analyses: "broadeners" who expanded their initially limited range of emotional sources of EDA, "stablers" who began and kept more abstract definitions from the start, and "puzzlers" who experienced growing uncertainty and skepticism regarding the meaning of EDA.

This dissertation demonstrates the utility of EDA as well as significant possible risks when used in social settings. EDA can serve the important function of conveying awareness and closeness with others and even communicate states like relaxation that are not typically served by language. However, flawed assumptions regarding EDA's scientific authority and direct ties to emotions can lead to misguided conclusions about the subjective states of others or even of oneself. Data about our bodies is simultaneously intimate and foreign, and depending on how it's wielded can serve to nourish and strengthen social connection in the face of widening technological isolation and division, or contribute to the harms, misinterpretations, and miscommunications already rampant in an increasingly mediated world.

What would it feel like to run outside, right now, and attempt a somersault on the first surface you find? Taking seriously an invitation like this to imagine a (perhaps unlikely) future, prompts the activation of evolutionary machinery in the mind and body that took millions of years to emerge. The ability to answer this question depends upon a surprisingly complex model of yourself, the ecology you inhabit, and how you interact within it. Throughout the first several seconds of engaging with this prompt, you have likely tapped memories of a wide spatial vicinity around you, and the types of surfaces likely to be encountered. The season, today's weather, the existence of a lawn and the schedule of a sprinkler system, all brought to bear to produce simulations of the kinds of experience that might result, and the sorts of choices that might be required. Enactive and embodied views of cognition tell us that these simulated experiences are not unitary but parallel and overlapping (A. Clark, 2015), are unbound to typical temporal sequences and durations (Arnold, Iaria, & Ekstrom, 2016), and live not in your head as local neural traces, but leverage your entire body (Thompson, 2010) as you consider the sensory and motor consequences of an activity you may not have performed in quite a while, and certainly never in this particular context. These simulations are constructed under the guidance of past experiences (how fast do you typically run?), counterfactual contingencies (what if the lawn is too crowded?), and knowledge of complex causal relations and social dynamics (how would a passerby respond? what would a colleague think?).

Embodied, prospective simulations of this sort are not a rare occurrence prompted primarily by thought experiments in a thesis. They are ubiquitous in our daily experience. Our cognitive ability to predict how events may unfold in time, how the world will respond to our actions, and how our body will respond to the world, is likely one of the central, and perhaps unique (Bulley, Henry, & Suddendorf, 2016), competencies that allow members of our species to solve problems we've never before encountered, and construct, share, and run experiments on candidate actions and plans before committing to enact them.

This work focuses predominantly on the domain of spatial navigation. As a modeling target, navigation enjoys a long history in computer science, as well as the planning literature, and appears as one of four categories included in Buckner and Carrol's ontology of self-projection (Buckner & Carroll, 2007). Given its natural low-dimensional spatial state space, navigation is especially well-suited to behavioral study.

Psychologists have gathered a long list of effects outlining key features of the way we learn about and model the world. Tendencies to infer causal relations (Kushnir & Gopnik, 2005), to perceive patterns (even when none exists, e.g. Fyfe, Williams, Mason, and Pickup (2008)), to develop an intuitive understanding of physical systems (Krist, Fieberg, & Wilkening, 1993), to categorize, and hierarchically arrange novel stimuli and task environments (Collins & Frank, 2013), are all suggestive of the processes by which such a model are learned and employed. However, far less is known about the dynamics by which we navigate this internal model, its constraints and topology, or the mechanisms by which simulations traverse large spatial and temporal distances to most effectively instruct the action-oriented needs of the present. In short, we know little about the kinematics of mental simulation. I aim to pursue, then, the following claim: by studying behavior and sensory exploration during navigation, we may begin to characterize the human solution to planning in an uncertain world, and take steps towards a kinematics of prospective mental simulation---the dynamic process by which individuals embody and interact with multiple possible futures.

This work is guided by research questions that I categorize into three areas of inquiry: 1) embodied planning, 2) visual salience and simulation kinematics in navigation planning, and 3) prospection in joint planning.

Embodied planning

Questions in this area aim to explore the limits of classical approaches, and suggest avenues and opportunities to develop a more nuanced and naturalistic theory of planning in the real world. I will argue in Chapter 3 that this need to accommodate embodied dynamics---in decision-making as well as less explicitly choice-centered natural activities---requires us, as a scientific community, to develop new models better able to capture the richness of the mental processes that anticipate and drive action in the world. The reviewed work displays a range of approaches to bring embodied intelligence into communication with the classical literature on decision-making and planning. In particular, I'll develop the concept of the affordance landscape, with example applications in various naturalistic (and fundamentally embodied) tasks such as playing team sports, climbing, and crossing a river. These theoretical arguments and methodologies set a foundation for the next research area, in which a mode of embodiment particularly relevant to visual creatures like ourselves is explored.

Visual salience and simulation kinematics in navigation planning

This area captures the primary empirical questions of this dissertation, and motivates the use of an agent model designed to iteratively learn the sort of affordance landscapes discussed in Chapter 3. I'll tackle questions about attractors of visual attention, and temporal sampling dynamics, through a variety of behavioral analyses. Key findings in Chapters 4 and 5 include: the predictive relationship between planning-time biometrics and navigation-time decisions, geometric and map-geometry attributes most predictive of attention, as well as various hierarchical aspects of the sequential gaze patterns seen during planning. I also report behavioral differences between top and bottom performers in this task, which raise plausible explanations for how, and through what mechanisms, individuals differ in their spatial planning abilities.

Prospection in joint planning

In the third area of inquiry I'll look beyond the individual spatial navigation paradigm to explore the case of multiple collaborators who must, through a variety of techniques, converge on a shared strategy to jointly solve the task at hand. I propose that some of these techniques implicate a planning process driven by the simulation of (shared) counterfactual future trajectories. However, I also acknowledge the significant additional complexity that comes from introducing social interaction, even in relatively simple problem-solving paradigms, and even when verbal communication is limited. I report findings from a two-person collaborative task which suggests a history-dependence of strategy selection when task dynamics changed. Fairness (defined as the balance of effort) was found to be lower in imbalanced task environments, as well as during the more difficult blocks requiring greater partner monitoring. Finally, I find a persistent bias towards spatial separation (which likely helps avoid interaction and enhances decoupling between collaborators), even among dyads using strict color-based strategies, highlighting that non-trivial hybrid approaches which mix conventions can be productively adopted even in non-verbal collaborative settings.

This investigation of embodied prospection builds on a diverse multidisciplinary literature spanning work on mental simulation and episodic foresight in psychology, predictive processing in philosophy of mind, hippocampal preplay and internally generated sequences in neuroscience, embodied and enactive cognitive science, as well as a number of biologically inspired computational models of planning.

Contributions

Building on this multidisciplinary foundation, I hope to make three contributions:

First is a conceptual extension made by projecting the body outwards into its likely future, and seeing this projection as a first class representation of the self within which simulations are continuously run. My claim is that this projection is the interface within which future-determining actions are enacted, and is therefore, in an important sense, cognitively inseparable from the individual. Furthermore, the sensorimotor patterns generated in these simulations are not fundamentally different from the inferential (and simulative) process of perception in the present, and therefore are equally constitutive of our moment-to-moment experience. Second, following Guest and Martin (2021), I propose an instantiation of this theoretical framing within a computational agent given control of a sensory apparatus similar to ours, and tasked with the same types of navigational challenges posed to the human participants in my studies. I argue that models like this one can help to achieve a unified conceptual framing of future-oriented dynamics that links both low-level predictive processing (which may operate over short temporal durations), with the kinds of dramatically extended episodic simulations typical when studying mental time travel. While a diversity of mechanisms are entailed in such a unified framework, I believe seeing these as two ends of a continuum with shared function, and more than likely, algorithmic and process-level correspondence as well.

Third, I share a series of empirical findings relating to visually guided planning and execution within spatial navigation problems. Some results are consistent with the more speculative ideas raised earlier in this section, and others highlight the remaining gaps in our understanding of the tremendously complex processes underlying visual search, prospection, and planning.

By pursuing the larger project within which this work sits, we can work towards a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics by which individuals generate and test expectations for the future. If successful, this project should help deepen our understanding of the way these prospective cognitive processes are embedded in a body, and a complex motor system, that grounds them in the world around us. If so, we may better appreciate the aspects of human intelligence that are truly unique, and defined by a complexity that is still far out of reach of replication in artificial systems. As such, perhaps our computational abilities will be better leveraged towards the design of tools personalized to individual preferences and idiosyncrasies, or even self-acknowledged oversights. Such systems may be able to externalize more legible beliefs, risks, and hypothetical futures, and by availing these to us, help enable more effective communication and collaboration. Finally, by better understanding how individuals project themselves into uncertain futures, and reason about long-term consequences, we might prepare ourselves, as a society, to more effectively face the challenges still ahead.

With the rise of global telecommunications networks, and especially with the worldwide spread of the Internet, the world is considered to be becoming an information society: a society in which social relations are patterned by information, transcending time and space through the use of new information and communications technologies. Much of the popular press and academic literature on the information society focuses on the dichotomy between the technologically-enabled virtual space of information, and the physical space of the material world. However, to understand the nature of virtual space, and of the information society, it is critical to understand the politics of the technological infrastructure through which they are constructed. In this dissertation, I study the infrastructure of the Internet to examine the processes through which the dichotomy between virtual space and physical space is produced. It is through Internet infrastructure that the seemingly placeless appearance of virtual space is produced over disparate physical telecommunications infrastructures which are fixed in space, such as copper telephone wires, satellites, and optical fiber cables.

My examination of Internet infrastructure focuses on the system of interconnections amongst the networks which make up the Internet, which is called the inter-domain routing system. For all that the Internet is spoken of as a singular entity, it is in fact a complex distributed system of over 47,000 interconnected networks spanning the world. It is these interconnections - in the shape of the inter-domain routing system - which allow the Internet to appear to be a single entity, and provide the means through which the apparent placelessness of virtual space is produced. I approach the problem of understanding the production of virtual space by examining the mechanisms involved in the maintenance of order within the Internet's inter-domain routing system.

To examine the mechanisms involved in maintaining order in the inter-domain routing system, I study the technology and practices involved in the interconnection of networks. The technology which enables network interconnection is the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which allows the establishment of network interconnections without any need for centralized oversight. In the absence of centralized oversight, I found that the practices involved in operating BGP rely on coordination and collaboration amongst the technical personnel responsible for managing the interconnection of networks. Coordination and collaboration are enabled amongst the Internet's technical personnel through social relationships of trust, running across corporate and state boundaries. Even though the inter-domain routing system operates without centralized oversight, it does rely on centralized institutional structures for specialized functions, such as standards-setting activity, and the allocation of unique numbering resources required to identify networks in the inter-domain routing system, and to identify computers within networks. The personnel involved in managing network interconnections, and in administering centralized institutions do so - to varying degrees - with an ideal of serving the common good, acting "for the good of the Internet".

I argue that order is maintained within the inter-domain routing system through a distributed system of trust relationships, which are anchored by centralized institutional structures. As an arrangement of mechanisms for maintaining order, I consider this to be a governance arrangement, which I term "distributed governance".

Distributed governance is an unusual, and possibly unique, model of governance. It has three distinguishing features which mark it off from hierarchical and market-based models of governance. First, in its reliance on a distributed system of trust relationships. These are produced and reproduced in the practice of interconnecting networks, and through professional communities of the technical personnel responsible for managing network interconnections. Second, in its centralized institutional structures, which are uniquely organized amongst global governance institutions. None of these centralized institutional structures are formed by international treaty, and all of them are strongly committed to openness and participation. Third, in its operation over the particular technological form of BGP which emphasizes coordination and collaboration. To change the technology of inter-domain routing would be to change the range of governance possibilities for inter-domain routing, modifying the nature of distributed governance itself.

These distinguishing features are sites of contestation. Although technical personnel do owe allegiance to their professional communities, and to one another through trust relationships, they are also employees of corporations which invest in Internet infrastructure, and citizens of nation states which regulate (and sometimes invest in) Internet infrastructure in their territories. Distributed governance is accordingly complicated by market relationships, the interests of nation states, and international relations amongst nation states, just as markets, nation states and international relations are complicated by distributed governance.

To make sense of distributed governance as a global system, I study its instantiation in professional communities of the Internet's technical personnel, centralized institutional arrangements, and state and market interests across two different regions: North America, which is relatively central to the global Internet, and South Asia, which is relatively peripheral. This provides the opportunity to perform a comparison between these two cases, to understand at once how distributed governance varies under different conditions, and how different articulations of distributed governance are linked into a single global system of governance.

The range of social possibilities within a society are shaped by the model of governance which provides it with order. To understand the nature of the information society, it is essential to understand the mechanisms of distributed governance. Indeed, I argue that the social values of "freedom" and "democracy" which are often ascribed to the Internet are only made possible through distributed governance. Equally, these social values cannot be maintained through technology alone. They must be served by an appropriate combination of technology and social arrangements of technical personnel who act with these social values in mind, "for the good of the Internet".

In a world instrumented with smart sensors and digital platforms, some of our most intimate and information-rich data are being collected and curated by private companies. The opportunities and risks derived from potential knowledge carried within these data streams are undeniable, and the clustering of data within the private sector is challenging traditional data infrastructures and sites of research. The role of private industry in research and development (R&D) has traditionally been limited—especially for earlier stage research—given the high risk, long time horizons, and uncertain returns on investment. However, the information economy has changed the way Silicon Valley and other technology firms operate their business models, which has vast implications for how they respectively innovate. Information drives competitive advantage, and builds upon the emergence of technical infrastructure for collecting, storing, and analyzing data at scale.

Basic research and fundamental inquiry are becoming important innovation priorities for private firms as they tailor algorithms and customize services, and these changes have vast implications for individual privacy and research ethics. This information-intensive innovation does not simply introduce a new source of inquiry, but a shift in the possibilities and boundaries that enable market edge.

This shift challenges prior models of innovation and reconsiders the role of the private firm within the research ecosystem—specifically in regards to Vannevar Bush’s Linear Model of Innovation and Donald Stokes’ Quadrant Model of Scientific Research. This change builds upon prior Silicon Valley innovation models outlined by AnnaLee Saxenian and Henry Chesbrough, but features additional key changes within industry R&D that are fundamentally reshaping the role of the firm within the broader ecosystem. No longer can industry be cast as a place only equipped to grapple exclusively with narrowly applied or developmental research and fully separated or agnostic from users, customers, and citizens. Within this information and data abundant moment, the research and innovation ecosystem is at an inflection point that could alter decades of embedded beliefs and assumptions on who should conduct research and ask fundamental questions, not to mention who should govern and grant access to research data.

This dissertation studies how the rise of data science infrastructure is changing the role of the private firm in the R&D ecosystem. This research works to understand how and under what conditions private sector firms are synthesizing user data (e.g., those picked up by sensors) internally and/or shared externally for research purposes. This dissertation specifically looks at applications of biosensed data for the purposes of social, behavioral, health, or public health research applications. Qualitative and mixed methods are used to research, document, and examine practices within the lens of existing research and innovation theoretical models. Historical frameworks are used to ground and place contemporary practices within broader context.

This research presents three illustrative cases on firms that exemplify different aspects of strategies to adapt to the competitive pressures of information-intensive innovation. The firms include the Lioness smart vibrator, Kinsa smart thermometer, and Basis smart watch. This research establishes findings about how firms are working within the data and R&D landscape, and how new pressures are influencing emerging practices and strategies. Findings outline the changing definitional boundaries of research within the private firm, and evolving practices relating to knowledge sharing and research activities within the firms. This analysis also points to two key emerging challenges firms are coping with, including how to grapple with research ethics and the rise of secrecy practices that may impede collaboration and research strategies implicit with information-intensive innovation.

Research is occurring at many levels within firms, breaking free of any traditional laboratory structure. Collaborations and data sharing with academics for mutually beneficial research partnerships are taking new, largely unstructured forms to meet rising demand and interest. There is fresh demand for new kinds of collaboration models derived from data sharing needs, and exploration into ways of leveraging research practices and incorporating academic research curiosity across firms.

This dissertation concludes by summarizing the importance of reconsidering the role of the firm within the broader R&D ecosystem and broader policy considerations. Programs to help structure and incentivize private/academic research collaborations should be considered, and private firms should consider their internal protocols and strategies in light of this changing landscape.

If there's one thing one can expect from information technology deployments in developing countries-it's the unexpected. From 2007-2010, I combined my skills as a software developer with ethnographic methods to observe the use of information technology in a non-governmental organization (NGO) in Southwest Uganda. This NGO subsidizes health facilities by paying for sexually transmitted infection treatment on the basis of claims submitted after the patient consultation, targeting treatment of 99,000 clients between 2006-2011. The program addresses a real need - in the program area, a household survey found that while 39% of the population reported STI symptoms, only 1/3 sought care. However,

management of this program is information intensive. As part of my studies, I implemented and tested Claim Mobile, a smartphone-based data collection application intended to reduce claims processing delays and improve health facility engagement. I successfully tested Claim Mobile in Summer 2008, processing 35 claims for two health facilities, and then discontinued its deployment six months later, when I decided that integration and scale-up of the technology would be problematic for the changing context the NGO. New priorities and new program management practices revealed `invisible constraints' that a redesign of Claim Mobile would not accommodate.

This dissertation addresses the ways in which I as a researcher, an NGO, and their beneficiary health service providers deal with and understand social and technological change. I discuss how the NGO program staff 'braided' communications together to address their communications needs, the ways in which choices in design can affect stakeholder relationships, and reflect on the reasons for Claim Mobile's 'failure'. I find that 1) designs must account for all stakeholders, not just users, 2) ICTs are used in co-evolving and co -dependent, braided ways, 3) affordances and constraints change over time, as well as in relation to the different user contexts, and as a result 4) designs are subject to changing context.

The creators of technical infrastructure are under social and legal pressure to comply with expectations that can be difficult to translate into computational and business logics. This dissertation bridges this gap through three projects that focus on privacy engineering, information security, and data economics, respectively. These projects culminate in a new formal method for evaluating the strategic and tactical value of data: data games. This method relies on a core theoretical contribution building on the work of Shannon, Dretske, Pearl, Koller, and Nissenbaum: a definition of situated information flow as causal flow in the context of other causal relations and strategic choices.

The first project studies privacy engineering's use of Contextual Integrity theory (CI), which defines privacy as appropriate information flow according to norms specific to social contexts or spheres. Computer scientists using CI have innovated as they have implemented the theory and blended it with other traditions, such as context-aware computing. This survey examines computer science literature using Contextual Integrity and discovers, among other results, that technical and social platforms that span social contexts challenge CI's current commitment to normative social spheres. Sociotechnical situations can and do defy social expectations with cross-context clashes, and privacy engineering needs its normative theories to acknowledge and address this fact.

This concern inspires the second project, which addresses the problem of building computational systems that comply with data flow and security restrictions such as those required by law. Many privacy and data protection policies stipulate restrictions on the flow of information based on that information's original source. We formalize this concept of privacy as Origin Privacy. This formalization shows how information flow security can be represented using causal modeling. Causal modeling of information security leads to general theorems about the limits of privacy by design as well as a shared language for representing specific privacy concepts such as noninterference, differential privacy, and authorized disclosure.

The third project uses the causal modeling of information flow to address gaps in current theory of data economics. Like CI, privacy economics has focused on individual economic contexts and so has been unable to comprehend an information economy that relies on the flow of information across contexts. Data games, an adaptation of Multi-Agent Influence Diagrams for mechanism design, are used to model the well known economic contexts of principal-agent contracts and price differentiation as well as new contexts such as personalized expert services and data reuse. This work reveals that information flows are not goods but rather strategic resources, and that trade in information therefore involves market externalities.