Research Symposiums
Upcoming Research Symposium
Alex Hanna: Beyond Bias: Algorithmic Unfairness, Infrastructure, and Genealogies of Data
Problems of algorithmic bias are often framed in terms of lack of representative data or formal fairness optimization constraints to be applied to automated decision-making systems. However, these discussions sidestep deeper issues with data used in AI, including problematic categorizations and the extractive logics of crowdwork and data mining. In this talk, I make two interventions: first by reframing of data as a form of infrastructure, and as such, implicating politics and power in the construction of datasets; and secondly discussing the development of a research program around the genealogy of datasets used in machine learning and AI systems. These genealogies should be attentive to the constellation of organizations and stakeholders involved in their creation, the intent, values, and assumptions of their authors and curators, and the adoption of datasets by subsequent researchers.
Alex Hanna is a sociologist and senior research scientist working on the Ethical AI team at Google. Before that, she was an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology at the University of Toronto. Her research centers on origins of the training data which form the informational infrastructure of AI and algorithmic fairness frameworks, and the way these datasets exacerbate racial, gender, and class inequality.
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Past Research Symposiums
| Speaker | Date | Symposium Title |
|---|---|---|
| Johanna Drucker, Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Information Studies, UCLA | 11/01/2021 | Visual Epistemology and Information Studies |
| Daniel Greene, assistant professor, University of Maryland | 10/25/2021 | The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope |
| Gordon Pennycook, assistant professor, University of Regina | 10/18/2021 | Lazy thinking and inattention to accuracy drive misinformation on social media |
| Afra Mashhadi, assistant professor, UW Bothell | 10/11/2021 | Analyzing biases that impact visit estimation of urban parks & green spaces |
| Michelle Johnson-Jennings, professor, UW School of Social Work | 10/4/2021 | Indigenous Land-Based Healing |
| Joe Bak-Coleman, Kolina Koltai and Rachel Moran, postdoctoral researchers, UW Center for an Informed Public | 5/24/2021 | Student-Faculty Collaborations at the Center for an Informed Public |
| Joe Bak-Coleman, Kolina Koltai and Rachel Moran, postdoctoral researchers, UW Center for an Informed Public | 5/17/2021 | Postdoctoral Research at the Center for an Informed Public |
| Tara Dawson McGuinness, fellow and senior adviser, New Practice Lab | 5/10/2021 | Power to the Public: The Promise of Public Interest Technology |
| Libby Hemphill, associate professor, University of Michigan School of Information | 5/3/2021 | How Should We Save Social Media Data? |
| Adele Vrana and Anasuya Sengupta, co-directors and co founders, Whose Knowledge? | 4/26/2021 | Knowledge (in)justice online: the principles and practices of Whose Knowledge? |
| Jennifer Wemigwans, Assistant Professor - Adult Education and Community Development Program, Dept of Leadership, Higher and Adult Ed, University of Toronto | 4/19/2021 | Digital Bundles and the Role of the Helper |
| Seeta Peña Gangadharan, Associate Professor, Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics | 4/12/2021 | Technological Refusal: Reflections on a Politics of Computing |
| Kevin Clark, director of original animation, Netflix | 4/5/2021 | Media Youth: Tech, TV & Games, Oh My! |
| Nicole Cooke, Augusta Baker Endowed Chair and Associate Professor, School of Information Science, U of SC | 3/29/2021 | Re-envisioning LIS: Activating Social Justice |
| Roderic Crooks, Department of Informatics, UC-Irvine | 12/7/2020 | Access Is Capture: Edtech, Datafication, and Racial Capitalism |
| Andre Brock, School of Literature, Media, and Communication, Georgia Institute of Technology | 11/30/2020 | Interrogating the Role of Belief in Technology Design and Use |
| Marisa Duarte, School of Social Transformation, Arizona State University | 11/16/2020 | McDonalds WiFi is Not a Solution: Challenges to Digital Divide Research in Indian Country Amid COVID-19 |
| Tanu Mitra, UW iSchool | 11/9/2020 | Algorithmic Governance: Auditing Search and Recommendation Algorithms for Misinformation |
| Bill Howe, UW iSchool | 11/2/2020 | Integrative Data Equity Systems |
| Alicia Cheng, MGMT Design | 10/26/2020 | This is What Democracy Looked Like: A Visual History of the Printed Ballot |
| Tonia Sutherland, Information and Computer Sciences Department, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa | 10/19/2020 | Speaking for the Dead |
| Ruha Benjamin, Princeton University | 10/12/2020 | Race to the Future? Reimagining the Default Settings of Technology & Society |
| Temi Odumosu, Malmö University, Sweden | 10/5/2020 | Colonial JPEGs and Questions of Care in Collections |
| Sid Suri, principal researcher, Microsoft | 4/27/2020 | Ghost Work: The Labor that Powers AI |
| Eric Gordon, director, Engagement Lab at Emerson College | 4/22/2020 | Meaningful Inefficiencies: Incorporating play and care into the design of socio-technical systems |
| Daniel M. Russell, Senior Research Scientist for Search Quality and User Happiness, Google | 2/14/2020 | The Joy of Search: A Google Insider's Guide to Going Beyond the Basics |
| Bernie Boscoe, postdoctoral researcher, UW iSchool | 2/7/2020 | With Strings Attached: Reusing Open Data in Research |
| Bo Zhao, assistant professor, Geography, UW | 2/3/2020 | Deep Fake in Geography? When Geospatial Data Encounter Artificial Intelligence |
| Lisa Nathan, associate professor, University of British Columbia School of Information | 1/27/2020 | Changing Course: Information Schools & Our Climate Crisis |
| Zetta Elliott, children's literature author | 1/21/2020 | Fairies Are for White Girls' and Other Lies My Sister Told Me |
| Andrea Hartzler, associate professor, Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education, UW | 12/2/2019 | UnBIASED: Understanding Biased Patient-Provider Interaction and Supporting Enhanced Discourse |
| Amy J. Ko, associate professor, UW iSchool | 11/26/2019 | Big Ideas Behind the Whyline |
| Jens Molbak, founder, WinWin | 11/25/2019 | Building a 'Tri-Sector' Open Data Tech Platform to Drive Societal Progress at Scale |
| Greg Vanderheiden, director & founder, Trace R&D Center, University of Maryland - College Park | 11/22/2019 | Underestimating Barriers Posted by Cognition and Digital Literacy |
| Michelle H. Martin, Beverly Cleary Professor for Children & Youth Services, UW iSchool | 11/18/2019 | A tribute to black childhood in music, story, and pictures |
| Michaeil Best, associate professor, Georgia Institute of Technology | 11/5/2019 | Value Sensitive Design & U.N. Peacekeepers |
| Anind K. Dey, Amy J. Ko & Jacob O. Wobbrock, UW iSchool faculty members | 11/4/2019 | Lasting Impact: A Panel with 3 Recent iSchool Award Winners |
| Emma Spiro, assistant professor, UW iSchool | 10/29/2019 | Online Social Behavior during Crisis Events |
| William Jones, research professor emeritus, UW iSchool | 10/28/2019 | Information, knowledge and successful aging |
| Megan Finn, assistant professor, UW iSchool | 10/21/2019 | We are all well: A partial history of public information infrastructures after disasters |
| Chirag Shah, associate professor, UW iSchool | 10/14/2019 | Counteracting Bias and Increasing Fairness in Search |
| Jevin West, associate professor, UW iSchool | 10/7/2019 | Calling BS in an Age of Misinformation |
| Tung Bui, chair, professor & director, Shidler College of Business, University of Hawai'i | 9/30/2019 | Toward the institutionalization of communication practices in social media platforms |
| S. Craig Watkins, director, Institute for Media Innovation, University of Texas at Austin | 6/10/2019 | The Digital Age: Why Educators Should Develop Future Ready Schools |
| Hans Jochen Scholl, professor, UW iSchool | 6/3/2019 | Disaster Response in the Pacific Northwest |
| Miranda Belarde-Lewis, assistant professor, UW iSchool | 5/20/2019 | Indigenous Curation: How Community Voices, Tribal History, and Native Art Can Inform Information Science |
| Julia Flanders, professor of practice & director, Digital Scholarship Group, Northeastern University | 5/13/2019 | The Shape of Data |
| Susan Hildreth, professor of practice, UW iSchool | 5/21/2018 | Co-Creating MLIS Curriculum for Cultural Competence and Community-Driven Learning: Making Progress for the Future of Libraries |
| Kevin Crowston, Distinguished Professor of Information Science and Associate Dean for Research, Syracuse University | 4/12/2018 | Gravity Spy: Humans, Machines and The Future of Citizen Science |
| Anna Lauren Hoffmann, assistant professor, UW iSchool | 1/8/2018 | Toward a Conception of Data Violence: Data Justice Beyond Distributions |
| Jevin West, assistant professor, UW iSchool | 12/4/2017 | Calling BS on Phrenology 2.0 |
| Batya Friedman, professor, UW iSchool; and Emily Bender, professor, UW Linguistics Department | 11/20/2017 | Articulating How NLP Data and Systems Do and Don't Represent the World: Toward Mitigating Bias and Enabling Better Science |
| Joseph T. Tennis, associate professor, UW iSchool | 11/13/2017 | Through Formal Analysis and Theories of Meaning: Extending the Trajectory of S. R. Ranganathan’s Theoretical Frameworks in Classification Research |
| Bob Boiko, teaching professor, UW iSchool | 11/6/2017 | Figuring Out What’s Next in Pedagogy and Learning Systems |
| Volker Wulf, Professor of Information Systems and New Media at the University of Siegen Germany | 12/5/2016 | Grounded Design: A Practise-based Approach to the Design and Use of IT Artefacts |
| Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland-College Park | 10/6/2016 | Interactive Visual Discovery in Event Analytics: Exploring Education & Other Data |