Operational Context of Civic Data
Firaz Peer, University of Kentucky
Dr Firaz Peer, is an Assistant Professor of Information Communication Technology in the University of Kentucky’s School of Information Science. They study issues of accountability, justice, care, and equity that manifest when building, using and maintaining algorithmic and data infrastructures for marginalized communities – by combining participatory and design-based research methods with scholarship from Human-Computer Interaction and Science and Technology Studies.
Redesigning Mobility Aid for Challenging Environments: A Case Study from the World’s Largest Refugee Camp
Faheem Hussain, Arizona State University
In this talk, Faheem Hussain shared his key findings from a multi-year ICT4D research on mobility aid for Rohingya refugees from Myanmar. Humanitarian crises hit vulnerable groups hardest, such as people with disabilities. Conflicts also increase disabilities caused by injuries or malnutrition. When these disabilities require mobility assistive devices, navigating environmental obstacles in limited-resource settings becomes significantly difficult.
AI, Social Justice and Challenges for Digital Civics
Alan Dix, Swansea University
Alan Dix is Director of the Computational Foundry, at Swansea University and a Professorial Fellow at Cardiff Metropolitan University. He is known principally for his work in human–computer interaction, including writing one of the key textbooks in the area. He was elected to the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2013 and is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. Outside academia, Alan has been co-founder of two tech companies, developed intelligent lighting, worked in local government and even submarine design.
Social Effects of AI-Generated Content – Deepfakes
Dilrukshi Gamage, Harvard University
In this presentation, Dilrukshi Gamage shared research insights on the complex societal effects of AI-generated content, with a particular emphasis on Deepfakes and their ethical implications. Dr. Dilrukshi Gamage is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Colombo, School of Computing in Sri Lanka and an affiliate in the Berkman Klein Center, Internet Society at Harvard University.
Governance of AI as Collective Intelligence
Eleonore Fournier Tombs, UN AI Advisory Board
In this talk, Eleonore Fournier Tombs talks about the way in which artificial intelligence mirrors collective intelligence and what that means for its governance. She draws from research exploring citizen deliberation to explain how collective ideas and values are shaped in a variety of domains, including in online townhalls and Indigenous parliaments. She also explains current risks in AI and how they highlight the risks and opportunities of deliberation and collective intelligence, especially in the domains of discrimination, stereotyping and exclusion of historically marginalised groups.
Refusing Empathy – Fostering Solidarity & Kinship
Katta Spiel, TU Wien
Researchers and practitioners engaging in participatory processes often avoid explicitly addressing these power issues. By orienting themselves on empathy, they inherently risk to centre their own understanding and relating to technological experiences over those of participants — with dire material consequences, particularly for marginalised populations. In this context, Katta Spiel proposes a guiding concept focused on humility at the core of participatory design to orient researchers and industry representatives on practices around 1) making space for participants’ contributions, 2) listening to what is expressed and what is not, and 3) deliberately share the agency and meaning, making process that is traditionally less in the hands of participants. Katta Spiel argues that by actively engaging with our privileged positions and deliberately being humble in terms of our expertise, we actively encounter the possibilities to create spaces in which we can attend to our participants with an interest to epistemic justice instead of habitually risking to override their contributions and experiences by filtering them through ours. Katta Spiel is an Assistant Professor for ‘Critical Access in Embodied Computing’ at TU Wien. They research marginalised perspectives on embodied computing through a lens of Critical Access.
Solidarity not Charity! Empowering Local Communities for Disaster Relief during COVID-19 through Grassroots Support
Tiffany Knearem, Google
Tiffany Knearem is a UXR at Google on the Material Design team. She is interested in AI applications for design tooling to support product designer-developer collaboration and unlock creativity. For her PhD her primary research focus was on understanding and enabling community innovation through information and communication technologies, with a dissertation focus on community-based care during COVID-19.
How communities experience and deal with economic and technological pressures in areas of post-conflict and social instability
Débora de Castro Leal, University of Siegen
Débora is an activist, social designer, and Amazonian Decolonial thinker. She is currently a research associate at the University of Siegen, where her research is about how communities experience and deal with economic and technological pressures in areas of post-conflict and social instability. Her PhD dissertation explored how peripheral communities in the Amazon rainforest make use of digital technology and connect to global supply chains and infrastructures of globalised capitalism. She is also interested in a critical perspective on technology production, which would include the entire technology “production chain” from its material origins, like mining in the Amazon rainforest, to the data centres where data is stored or manipulated.