Below is a list of academic publications, reports, and conference papers, and panel appearances. Further publication information can be found at Google Scholar.
Peer-reviewed publications
As sole/first/joint-first author
Cowls, J., Morley, J., and Floridi, L. (2022). App store governance: implications, limitations, and regulatory responses. Telecommunications Policy.
Cowls, J.*, Darius, P.*, Santistevan, D.* and Schramm, M. (2022). Constitutional metaphors: Facebook’s ‘Supreme Court’ and the Legitimation of Platform Governance. New Media & Society.
Cowls, J., Tsamados, A., Taddeo, M., & Floridi, L. (2021). The AI Gambit—Leveraging artificial intelligence to combat climate change: Opportunities, challenges, and recommendations. AI & Society.
Cowls, J. (2021). ‘AI for Social Good’: Whose Good and Who’s Good? Introduction to the Special Issue of on Artificial Intelligence for Social Good. Philosophy & Technology 34(1), 1-5.
Cowls, J., Tsamados, A., Taddeo, M., & Floridi, L. (2021). A definition, benchmark and database of AI for social good initiatives. Nature Machine Intelligence 3(2).
Roberts, H.*, Cowls, J.*, Casolari, F., Morley, J., Taddeo, M., & Floridi, L. (2021). Safeguarding European values with digital sovereignty: An analysis of statements and policies. Internet Policy Review 10(3).
Floridi, L.*, Cowls, J.*, King, T.C. and Taddeo, M. (2020). How to design AI for social good: seven essential factors. Science and Engineering Ethics 26 (3).
Cowls, J. and Schroeder, R. (2016). Causation, correlation, and big data in social science research. Policy & Internet 7 (4), 447-472.
As contributing author
Roberts, H., Cowls, J., Hine, E., Morley, J., Wang, V., Taddeo, M., & Floridi, L. (2022). Governing artificial intelligence in China and the European Union: Comparing aims and promoting ethical outcomes. The Information Society.
Tan, Z. M., Aggarwal, N., Cowls, J., Morley, J., Taddeo, M., & Floridi, L. (2021). The ethical debate about the gig economy: A review and critical analysis. Technology in Society 65.
Roberts, H., Cowls, J., Hine, E., Mazzi, F., Tsamados, A., Taddeo, M., & Floridi, L. (2021). Achieving a ‘Good AI Society’: comparing the aims and progress of the EU and the US. Science and Engineering Ethics 27.
Taddeo, M., Tsamados, A., Cowls, J. and Floridi, L. (2021). Artificial intelligence and the climate emergency: Opportunities, challenges, and recommendations. One Earth 4 (6).
Perez-Pozuelo, I., Spathis, D., Gifford-Moore, J., Morley, J., & Cowls, J. (2021). Digital phenotyping and sensitive health data: Implications for data governance. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
Tsamados, A., Aggarwal, N., Cowls, J., Morley, J., Roberts, H., Taddeo, M., & Floridi, L. (2021). The ethics of algorithms: key problaems and solutions. AI & Society.
Morley, J., Cowls, J., Taddeo, M. and Floridi, L. (2020). Ethical guidelines for COVID-19 tracing apps. Nature 582 (7810).
Morley, J., Machado, C. C., Burr, C., Cowls, J., Joshi, I., Taddeo, M., & Floridi, L. (2020). The ethics of AI in health care: A mapping review. Social Science & Medicine.
Roberts, H., Cowls, J., Morley, J., Taddeo, M., Wang, V. and Floridi L. (2020). The Chinese approach to artificial intelligence: an analysis of policy, ethics, and regulation. AI & Society.
Morley, J., Cowls, J., Taddeo, M., & Floridi, L. (2020). Public health in the Information Age: recognizing the infosphere as a social determinant of health. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 22(8).
Floridi, L. and Cowls, J. (2019). A Unified Framework of Five Principles for AI in Society. Harvard Data Science Review 1 (1).
Floridi, L., Cowls, J. et al. (2018). AI4People—An ethical framework for a Good AI Society: opportunities, risks, principles, and recommendations. Minds & Machines 28 (4).
Meyer, E.T., Schroeder, R., and Cowls, J. (2016). The Net as a Knowledge Machine: How the Web Became Embedded in Research. New Media and Society 18(7).
Fjeld, M., Woźniak, P., Cowls, J. and Nardi, B. (2015). Ad-hoc encounters with big data: Engaging citizens in conversations around tabletops. First Monday 20 (2).
Taylor, L., Cowls, J., Schroeder, R. and Meyer, E.T. (2014). Big Data and positive change in the developing world: challenges and opportunities. Policy & Internet 6 (4).
Book chapters
Cowls, J. (2020). Deciding how to decide: six key questions for reducing AI’s democratic deficit. In Burr, C. and Milano, S. (eds.), The 2019 Yearbook of the Digital Ethics Lab. Springer.
Cowls, J. (2019). Privacy Risks and Responses in the Digital Era. In Öhman C., Watson D. (eds.), The 2018 Yearbook of the Digital Ethics Lab. Springer.
Cowls, J. and Schroeder, R. (2018). Tweeting All The Way To The White House. In Papacharissi, Z. and Boczkowski, P. (eds.), Trump and the Media. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Schroeder, R. and Cowls, J. (2018). Big Data Approaches to the Analysis of Social Media. In Jeremy Hunsinger, Lisbeth Klastrup and Matthew Allen (eds.), The International Handbook of Internet Research.
Brügger, N, Cowls, J. and Schroeder, R. (2018). The Historical Web as a Tool for Analysing Social Change. In Hunsinger, J. Klastrup, L. and Allen, M. (eds.), The International Handbook of Internet Research.
Cowls, J. (2017). Cultures of the UK Web. In Brügger, Niels and Schroeder, Ralph (eds.), The Web as History. London: UCL Press.
Cowls, J. and Bright, J. (2017). International Hyperlinks in Online News Media. In Brügger, Niels and Schroeder, Ralph (eds.), The Web as History. London: UCL Press.
Meyer, E.T., Yasseri, T., Hale, S.A., Cowls, J., Schroeder, R. and Margetts, H. (2017). Analysing the UK web domain and exploring 15 years of UK universities on the web. In Brügger, N. and Schroeder, R. (eds.), The Web as History.London: UCL Press.
Conference papers and posters
Cowls, J., Darius, P., Santistevan, D, and Schramm, M. (2021). Constitutional Metaphors: Facebook’s ‘Supreme Court’ and Platform Legitimation. Presented at the First Annual Conference of The Platform Governance Research Network, March 2021, virtual.
Cowls, J. (2019). The Silicon Cage: “Legitimate” governance 100 years after Weber. Presented at Data Power Conference, September 2019, Bremen, Germany.
Cowls, J. and Arthur, K. (2019). From #MAGA to @AOC: Reflections on Radical Media in the Trump Era. Media in Transition, May 2019, Cambridge, MA.
Cowls, J., Higgins, E. and Fendt, K. (2017). Active Archives: New Modes of Interaction with Online Archives. Poster presentation at Digital Humanities 2017, Montreal, Canada.
Nanni, F. and Cowls, J. (2016). The Potential and Perils of Election Prediction using Social Media Sources. Connected Life, June 2016, Oxford Internet Institute, UK.
Cowls, J. and Schroeder, R. (2015). Big Data and Power: What’s New(s)? Data Power Conference, June 2015, University of Sheffield, UK.
Schroeder, R., Cowls, J. and Meyer, E.T. (2015). Mining Data about the Public as a Tool for Policy. Policy-Making in the Big Data Era conference, June 2015, University of Cambridge, UK.
Cowls, J., Schroeder, R. and Meyer, E.T. (2015). Untangling the Archived Web for Humanities Research. ‘Web Archives as Scholarly Sources’, June 2015, Aarhus, Denmark.
Cowls, J. (2015). Using Big Data for Valid Research: three challenges. Big Data in a Transdisciplinary Perspective, Volkswagen Foundation Herrenhausen Conference, March 2015, Hannover, Germany.
Cowls, J. and Schroeder, R. (2015) The Ethics of Given-off versus Captured Data in Digital Social Research. Workshop on Ethics for Studying Sociotechnical Systems in a Big Data World, CSCW 2015, March 2015, Vancouver, B.C., Canada.
Cowls, J. (2014) The Crowd in the Cloud? Three challenges for gauging public opinion online. IPP2014: Crowdsourcing for Politics and Policy, September 2014, Oxford, UK.
Cowls, J., Taylor, L. and Schroeder, R. (2014). Big Data for Social Change: An LMIC Perspective. Data Science for Social Good Workshop, KDD@Bloomberg’, August 2014, New York, NY, USA.
Schroeder, R. and Cowls, J. (2014). Big Data, Ethics, and the Social Implications of Knowledge Production. Data Ethics Workshop, KDD@Bloomberg, August 24 2014, New York, NY, USA.
Reports, reviews, introductions, and commentaries
Leslie, D., Burr, C., Aitken, M., Cowls, J., Katell, M., & Briggs, M. (2021). Artificial intelligence, human rights, democracy, and the rule of law: a primer. Commissioned by and produced for the Council of Europe’s Ad Hoc Committee on Artificial Intelligence.
Cowls, J. and Morley, J (2020). Introduction to the 2020 Yearbook of the Digital Ethics Lab. Springer.
Cowls, J. and Higgins, E. (2018). Review: The Internet Revolution in the Sciences and Humanities. Internet Histories.
Rubinstein, M., Cowls, J. and Cath, C. (2016). OpenData.Innovation: An international journey to discover innovative uses of open data. Nesta.
Cowls, J. (2015). A Wilton Park conference report on privacy and surveillance.
Brown, I., and Cowls, J. (2015). Check The Web: Assessing The Ethics And Politics Of Policing The Internet For Extremist Material. VOX-Pol Reports.
Invited talks and panels
Building a Secure and Resilient Digital Society. Panel at Munich Cyber Security Conference, February 2020.
Power & Control of New Technologies. Panel at Munich Politics Network 2019: ‘Clashes in Global Economic Governance’. Munich, Germany, September 2019.
AI for Social Good. Moderator of panel at The AI Summit 2019. London, UK, July 2019.
Human-Centricity: The New Frontier for Successful AI. BSA-IMDA Roundtable at Innovfest Unbound 2019. Singapore, June 2019.
Big Data, Big Problems? Oxford Isis Magazine Panel Event, Oxford, UK, February 2019.
The Price of Convenience. BBC Machine Learning Fireside Chats. London, UK, October 2018.
Society in the Loop: Democracy. Panel at doteveryone Society in the Loop event, London, UK, September 2018.
AI Ethics. Panel at V&A Museum Digital Design Weekend. London, UK, September 2018.
The Ethics and Politics Of Policing The Internet For Violent Extremist Content. Invited presentation as part of the VOX-Pol lunch briefing series, King’s College, London, UK, November 2015.
Displaying and Visualising the Results of Big Domain Data Research. Invited presentation to ‘Digital Tools and Methods for using the UK web archive’, British Library, UK, May 2015.
Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities. (With Helen Hockx-Yu and Jane Winters) Invited presentation to the International Internet Preservation Consortium General Assembly, Stanford University, CA, USA, April 2015.
The Big Data Revolution for Human and Social Sciences. Invited presentation to ‘Big Data, Sciences Humaines, Sciences Sociales’, Universite Stendhal, France, December 2014.
Who does the web think you are? (With Ralph Schroeder). Public talk at ‘Being Human: a festival of the humanities’, London, November 2014.
Social media: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Public talk at BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, Oxfordshire Branch, Oxford, UK, September 2014.
Mapping the UK Webspace: the topology of a national web domain. Presentation to ‘Web Archiving and Archived Web — a new Research Method, a new Object of Study?’, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark, June 2014.
Accessing and Using Big Data to Advance Social Science Knowledge. (With Eric Meyer and Ralph Schroeder). Oxford Internet Institute Brown Bag Series, Oxford, June 2014.
Big Data and Political Science. Panel discussant at the American Political Science Association 2014, Washington, D.C., USA, August 2014.
Drinking from the firehose? The pitfalls and potential of Big Data. Presentation at t2i Lab, Chalmers Institute of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, March 2014.
Academic service
Reviewer: Governance; New Media & Society; Minds and Machines; Big Data and Society; Philosophy & Technology
Programme Committee Member: ACM FAT*
Organiser: Symposium on Intercultural Digital Ethics (2019); Workshop on AI for Social Good (2019); Connected Life (2015).
Josh Cowls 