Sebastian Benthall, Ph. D.

• Research Fellow, Information Law Institute, NYU School of Law
• Research Engineer, Econ-Ark

My research applies computational methods to questions about the political economy of information.

Current research includes:

• Designing software for macroeconomic simulations with heterogeneous agents, with Econ-ARK.

• Agent-Based Modeling of the impact of privacy by design on COVID-19 contact tracing applications, with the Agent-Based Modeling Lab at NYU School of Global Public Health.

• Studying the role of law in the maintenance of open source infrastructure, with Guarini Global Law and Tech.

• Building tools for computational analysis of organizational influence and diversity in Internet governance, with BigBang.

A goal of my research is to develop innovative approaches to the regulation of technology.

A secondary goal is to address the social and philosophical grounds of my own research methods.

§ Publications

*** - indicates a refereed publication.

Security and Privacy

• ***Benthall, S. (2019) Situated Information Flow Theory. Proceedings of the 6th Annual Hot Topics in the Science of Security (HoTSoS). (pdf)
• Nissenbaum, H., Benthall, S., Datta, A., Tschantz, M. C., & Mardziel, P. (2018). Origin Privacy: Protecting Privacy in the Big-Data Era. Technical Report. New York University. (link)
• ***Benthall, S., Gürses, S., and Nissenbaum, H. (2017) Contextual Integrity through the Lens of Computer Science. Foundations and Trends in Privacy and Security, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 1–69, 2017. DOI: 10.1561/3300000016. Winner of PLSC 2017 Junior Scholars Award.(pdf)
• Benthall, S. (2017) Assessing Software Supply Chain Risk Using Public Data. IEEE STC 2017 Software Technology Conference. (link)
• ***Benthall, S., Pinney, T., Herz, J., Plummer, K. (2016) An Ecological Approach to Software Supply Chain Risk Management. Proceedings of the 15th Python in Science Conference. p. 136-142. Ed. Sebastian Benthall and Scott Rostrup. (link) Video:
• Fanti, G., David, Y. B., Benthall, S., Brewer, E., and Shenker, S.. (2013) Rangzen: Circumventing Government-Imposed Communication Blackouts. Technical Report UCB/EECS-2013-128, EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley, Jul 2013. (link)

Computational Social Science

• Benthall, S. and Seth, M. Software Engineering as Research Method: Aligning Roles in Econ-ARK. In Meghann Agarwal, Chris Calloway, Dillon Niederhut and David Shupe, editors, Proceedings of the 19th Python in Science Conference, pages 156 – 161, 2020. doi:10.25080/Majora-342d178e-015 (link)
• ***Benthall, Sebastian, and Bruce D. Haynes. "Racial categories in machine learning." Proceedings of the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. ACM, 2019. (link) (video)
• ***Benthall, S. (2015) Testing Generative Models of Online Collaboration with BigBang. SciPy 2015. Ed. Kathryn Huff and James Bergstra. (link)
• Benthall, S. (2016) Philosophy of Computational Social Science. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol 12, No 2. (link)
• Benthall, S. (2016) The Human is the Data Science. Workshop on Developing a Research Agenda for Human-Centered Data Science. CSCW 2016. (link)
• ***Benthall, S. (2014) Designing Networked Publics for Communicative Action. Jenny Davis & Nathan Jurgenson (eds.) Theorizing the Web 2014 [Special Issue]. Interface 1.1. (link)

Miscellaneous

• ***Benthall, S. and Goldenfein, J. (2020) Data Science and the Decline of Liberal Law and Ethics. Ethics of Data Science Conference - Sydney 2020 (forthcoming). (SSRN)
• Benthall, S. (2017) Don't Fear the Reaper: Refuting Bostrom's Superintelligence Argument. Preprint, arXiv:1702.08495 (link)
• Benthall, S. (2013) "Why Weird Twitter", Ethnography Matters. (link) A brief and unlikely foray into social media ethnography...
• Benthall, S. and Chuang, J. (2013) "Computational Asymmetry in Strategic Bayesian Networks,” Poster at W-PIN+NetEcon 2013, Pittsburgh. arXiv:1206.2878 [cs.GT] (arXiv)
• Benthall, S. (2009). An open source web GIS solution-the OpenGeo stack. GEO informatics, 12, 40-43.
• ***Benthall, S. (2007) "Kudos for the Mindless Expert." Review of Expert Political Judgment, by Philip Tetlock. Critical Review, Volume 19, Issue 1, January 2007, pages 65-79. (link)

Software

• Econ-Ark, a toolkit for structural economic modeling with heterogeneous agents.
• BigBang is a toolkit for the scientific analysis of open collaborative communities.
• @TheTweetserve is a Twitter bot that's an experiment in subverting preferential attachment dynamics in networked public formation. (github)
• poll.emic - a tool for gathering egocentric networks of mentions on Twitter
• GeoNode, an open source geospatial data management system. It was part of an innovative strategy to leverage open source development practices for international development. There is still a great team working on it and deploying it as a product.

Dissertation

Sebastian Benthall. Context, Causality, and Information Flow: Implications for Privacy Engineering, Security, and Data Economics. Ph.D. dissertation. Advisors: John Chuang and Deirdre Mulligan. University of California, Berkeley. 2018. (eScholarship) (slideshare)

Background

2019 - Research Engineer, Econ-Ark

2018 - : Research Scholar at NYU. GGLT (2019 - ), ILI (2018 - ) and CCS (2018 - 2019).

2019 : Senior Data Engineer at Skopos Labs

2016 - 2018 : Researcher at Cornell Tech under Prof. Helen Nissenbaum.

2016 - 2019 : Data scientist at Ion Channel.

2011 - 2018 : PhD at UC Berkeley's School of Information.

2007 - 2011 : Worked in programming, management, and marketing in geospatial civic tech company, OpenGeo.

2007 : B.A., Brown University, Cognitive Science.

On the Web

bio blog twitter linkedin github slideshare

Contact

e-mail: spb413 at nyu dot edu