Schwartz, Andrew
FairFare: A Tool for Crowdsourcing Rideshare Data to Empower Labor Organizers
Calacci, Dana, Rao, Varun Nagaraj, Dalal, Samantha, Di, Catherine, Pua, Kok-Wei, Schwartz, Andrew, Spitzberg, Danny, Monroy-Hernández, Andrés
In recent years, labor organizers representing rideshare and delivery workers have advocated for regulations to improve working conditions in the rideshare industry that set wage floors and job loss protections [67]. To call for these improvements, organizers need to understand workers' existing conditions [37], a significant data access and social computing challenge in the rideshare industry. Labor organizers representing rideshare workers typically rely on a collage of qualitative anecdotes and screenshots to provide data about existing working conditions [24]. While these qualitative data provide rich, "thick descriptions" [30] of workers' experience, they are often dismissed by platforms as non-representative, cherry-picked examples. Rideshare platforms, on the other hand, have exclusive access to large-scale, comprehensive quantitative datasets of driver, trip, and pay data that they can draw upon to create authoritative narratives about working conditions in their industry [72]. Labor organizers need comprehensive access to large-scale quantitative data describing working conditions to conduct rigorous, independent investigations and contest platform-driven narratives. There are tools and legal frameworks that empower individual rideshare workers to independently access quantitative work data (e.g., Gridwise and Data Subject Access Requests). However, these tools and frameworks do not provide an intuitive way to aggregate individual worker data into a dataset that provides collective insight into overarching working conditions. Algorithmic auditing scholarship provides methods, like crowdsourcing data, to independently investigate black-boxed systems [66].
Functional network reorganization in motor cortex can be explained by reward-modulated Hebbian learning
Chase, Steven, Schwartz, Andrew, Maass, Wolfgang, Legenstein, Robert A.
The control of neuroprosthetic devices from the activity of motor cortex neurons benefits from learning effects where the function of these neurons is adapted to the control task. It was recently shown that tuning properties of neurons in monkey motor cortex are adapted selectively in order to compensate for an erroneous interpretation of their activity. In particular, it was shown that the tuning curves of those neurons whose preferred directions had been misinterpreted changed more than those of other neurons. In this article, we show that the experimentally observed self-tuning properties of the system can be explained on the basis of a simple learning rule. This learning rule utilizes neuronal noise for exploration and performs Hebbian weight updates that are modulated by a global reward signal. In contrast to most previously proposed reward-modulated Hebbian learning rules, this rule does not require extraneous knowledge about what is noise and what is signal. The learning rule is able to optimize the performance of the model system within biologically realistic periods of time and under high noise levels. When the neuronal noise is fitted to experimental data, the model produces learning effects similar to those found in monkey experiments.