Defence Against the (Digital) Dark Arts: Defining, Detecting and Measuring Unlawful Dark Patterns in the EU

Published a conference abstract Defence Against the (Digital) Dark Arts: Defining, Detecting and Measuring Unlawful Dark Patterns in the EU with Constanta Rosca, Bogdan Covrig, Catalina Goanta, Jerry Spanakis and Gunes Acar for the 5th Workshop on Technology and Consumer Protection (ConPro ’21).

The proposal says that the use of dark patterns on shopping websites to influence consumers’ transactional decisions raises concerns relating to the fairness of commerce. In the EU, the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive aims to protect consumers from unfair commercial practices employed by traders. However, the relative newness and the scale at which dark patterns are being deployed may impede consumer protection authorities’ efforts to enforce the law. Building on the research by Mathur et al., the main aim of this project is to explore ways to automatically measure trader compliance with the two legal instruments identified above using Data Mining and Natural Language Processing techniques.

https://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SPW2021/ConPro/papers/rosca-conpro21.pdf

I made this tiktok after I woke up with 50 dependabot notifications one morning 

https://twitter.com/BogdanCovrig/status/1387103228005949445

Web Monetization for Tech Content Creators

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DxRPn0UKKo

For Virtual Coffee's Month of Sharing, together with the awesomest Ray Deck, I published a Youtube video about Web Monetization and how tech writers can use it to get tips on their content. I am walking through Coil and Uphold setup, some third-party platforms that have Web Monetization integrated (dev.to, exposure.co, write.as), and the HTML monetization meta tag. 

Bonus content: longer hair and a christmas tree. 

Deploy to Deta GitHub Action

https://github.com/BogDAAAMN/deta-deploy-action
Built & published a simple GitHub Action to deploy a project to the cloud platform Deta. The action uses Deta's CLI to deploy the project to a Deta Micro and returns the status of the deployment.

The action is currently deployed in 34 GitHub projects.

Break the code challenge 

https://twitter.com/BogdanCovrig/status/1331963497136197636

Memed (and took part in) the Break the code challenge by .tech.

Return of the AI: An Analysis of Legal Research on Artificial Intelligence Using Topic Modeling

Published Return of the AI: An Analysis of Legal Research on Artificial Intelligence Using Topic Modeling with Constanta Rosca, Bogdan Covrig, Catalina Goanta, Gijs van Dijck and Gerasimos (Jerry) Spanakis in Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2020.
This paper explores what legal research on AI constitutes of and how it has evolved, while addressing the issues of information retrieval and research duplication. Using LDA Topic Modeling on a dataset of 3931 journal articles, the results provide insights into how a legal research on AI has evolved over time, and support for the development of machine learning and information retrieval tools like LDA that assist in structuring large document collections and identifying relevant articles.

http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2645/paper1.pdf