Watch a recording of our past events:

Feb. 3: Joan Donovan, What is Media Manipulation?

Journalists face a barrage of information and they must make choices about which stories to cover based on available source materials. Some stories, though, are just that, stories. Our research maps and tracks attempts by “media manipulators” to influence journalists and bait them into picking up false stories. During breaking news events, media manipulators act quickly to establish their narratives by creating and seeding content in order to trick journalists into covering specific highly politicized wedge issues…

Feb. 24: Catherine D’Ignazio + Lauren Klein, Data Feminism

As data are increasingly mobilized in the service of governments and corporations, their unequal conditions of production, their asymmetrical methods of application, and their unequal effects on both individuals and groups have become increasingly difficult for data scientists–and others who rely on data in their work–to ignore. But it is precisely this power that makes it worth asking: “Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science with whose interests in mind? These are some of the questions that emerge from what we call data feminism….

Mar. 10: Nathan Matias, Governing Human & Machine Behavior

The governance of real-time decision-making algorithms is one of society’s most pressing scientific challenges. In public discourse, these algorithms decide what we are allowed to say and rank the information we see. Because they adapt to human behaviors that they also influence, their actions have been hard to predict— representing a risk to society and a challenge for anyone who would govern their behavior…

Mar. 31: Ranveer Chandra, Empowering Farmers with Affordable Digital Agriculture Solutions

Data-driven techniques help boost agricultural productivity by increasing yields, reducing losses and cutting down input costs. However, these techniques have seen sparse adoption owing to high costs of manual data collection and limited connectivity solutions. In this talk we will describe our innovations that leverage the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence to help make affordable digital agriculture solutions…

Apr. 7: Suresh Venkatasubramanian, Critical Algorithm Studies: A View From Inside Computer Science

Suresh Venkatasubramanian is a professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah. He is particularly interested in the social ramifications of automated decision making. He is a founding member of the FAccT conference, member of the ACLU board of Utah, and a member of the Computing Community Consortium Council. His work has received press coverage across North America and Europe, including NPR’s Science Friday, NBC, and CNN…

Apr. 28: Lilly Irani, Claiming Democracy Over Digital Infrastructures

Lilly Irani is an Associate Professor of Communication & Science Studies at University of California, San Diego. She also serves as faculty in the Design Lab, Institute for Practical Ethics, the program in Critical Gender Studies, and sits on the Academic Advisory Board of AI Now (NYU). She is author of Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India (Princeton University Press, 2019). Chasing Innovation has been awarded the 2020 International Communication Association Outstanding Book Award…

May 5: Sasha Costanza-Chock, Design Justice

Design is key to our collective liberation, but most design processes today reproduce inequalities structured by what Black feminist scholars call the matrix of domination. Intersecting inequalities are manifest at all levels of the design process. Design justice focuses on the ways that design reproduces, is reproduced by, and/or challenges the matrix of domination (white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and settler colonialism). Design justice is also a growing community of practice that aims to ensure a more equitable distribution of design’s benefits and burdens…

Sep. 8: Mary L. Gray, The Banality of Scale

Mary L. Gray is Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and Faculty Associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She maintains a faculty position in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering with affiliations in Anthropology and Gender Studies at Indiana University. Mary, an anthropologist and media scholar by training, focuses on how people’s everyday uses of technologies transform labor, identity, and human rights. She earned her PhD in Communication from the University of California at San Diego in 2004, under the direction of Susan Leigh Star…

Sep. 29: Fernanda Viégas + Martin Wattenberg "Ways of Understanding AI"

Artificial intelligence isn’t a single technology—it’s become a broad field, with applications to almost every area of life. As a result, we can’t view it with just a single lens. Instead, we should use every tool at our disposal. Yes, math and engineering are important, but design and even art are critical as well. Through a series of examples we will discuss multiple ways of knowing and understanding how AI works, and how using these different lenses together can broaden participation in the field of AI…

Oct. 13: Kit Walsh "A Practical Framework for Human Rights Advocates to Combat Automated Injustice"

Algorithmic decision making is more and more common, and both potential and actual harms are well-documented. In this session of the Just Infrastructures series, Kit Walsh (she/her) will present both how advocates are using existing legal frameworks to protect the rights of those subject to these systems, and a framework for understanding the impact of these systems in the different contexts where they can be deployed, to inform future policy efforts…

Oct. 27: Shoshana Zuboff "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism"

In her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, scholar and sociologist Shoshana Zuboff posits a detailed examination of the unprecedented power of surveillance capitalism, by which our personal information, monetized and exploited by big tech companies, is then used to predict and shape our behaviors. In this frank and necessarily lucid talk, Zuboff defines the terms of surveillance capitalism as a new economic system, pioneered at Google and later Facebook, in much the same way that mass-production and managerial capitalism were pioneered at Ford…

Nov. 17: Mahadev Satyanarayanan "Wearable Cognitive Assistance"

Viewed as mobile computing systems with built-in sensing, processing, and persistent storage, humans are the result of more than 1 billion years of evolution. Our chances of improving upon nature in a short time (say, 10 years) are negligible if we are bound by the same rules as biological evolution. However, we have a unique opportunity that is not available to nature, namely, to amplify human cognition in real time through low-latency, wireless access to infrastructure resources….

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