Co-designing ML Models with Data Activists
In this talk I will introduce the principles of data feminism and give a first-person report from a large participatory-action-research-design project where we are co-designing technology with data activists. The “we” in question is myself, Silvana Fumega, and Helena Suárez Val, and we work in collaboration and solidarity with activist groups producing data to challenge feminicide – fatal gender-related violence against women – across the Americas. As all practitioners know, practice is messy and rarely adheres cleanly to pleasing principles. Throughout the talk, I will highlight resonances and tensions between our design process and the principles of data feminism, showing how we tried to operationalize these principles in interactive digital tools and machine learning models. I hope to surface my aspirations for more participatory technology design processes as well as raise lingering questions to the community so that we may think together about the limitations of co-designing for justice.
About the speaker
Catherine D’Ignazio is an Assistant Professor of Urban Science and Planning at MIT. She is also Director of the Data + Feminism Lab which uses data and computational methods to work towards gender and racial equity, particularly as they relate to space and place. D’Ignazio is a scholar, artist/designer and hacker mama who focuses on feminist technology, data literacy and civic engagement. With Rahul Bhargava, she built the platform Databasic.io, a suite of tools and activities to introduce newcomers to data science. Her 2020 book from MIT Press, Data Feminism, co-authored with Lauren F. Klein, charts a course for more ethical and empowering data science practices. Her research at the intersection of technology, design & social justice has been published in Science & Engineering Ethics, the Journal of Community Informatics, and the proceedings of Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM SIGCHI) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (ACM CSCW). Her art and design projects have won awards and been exhibited at the Venice Biennial and the ICA Boston.
“My AI must have been broken”: How AI Stands to Reshape Human Communication
From autocomplete and smart replies to video filters and deepfakes, we increasingly live in a world where communication between humans is augmented by artificial intelligence. AI often operates on behalf of a human communicator by recommending, suggesting, modifying, or generating messages to accomplish communication goals. We call this phenomenon AI-Mediated Communication (or AI-MC). While AI-MC has the potential of making human communication more efficient, it impacts other aspects of our communication in ways that are not yet well understood. Over the last three years, my collaborators and I have been documenting the impact of AI-MC on communication outcomes, language use, interpersonal trust, and more. The talk will outline early experimental findings from this work, mostly led by Cornell and Stanford graduate students Maurice Jakesch, Hannah Mieczkowski, and Jess Hohenstein. For example, the research shows that AI-MC involvement can result in language shifting towards positivity; impact the evaluation of others; change the extent to which we take ownership over our messages; and shift assignment of blame for communication outcomes. Given the impact of AI-MC on interpersonal evaluations, the talk will also cover our recent research examining the (mostly false) heuristics humans use when evaluating whether text was written by AI. Overall, AI-MC raises significant practical and ethical concerns as it stands to reshape human communication, calling for new approaches to the development and regulation of these technologies.
About the speaker
Mor Naaman is a professor of Information Science at Cornell Tech where he also serves as the associate dean for technical programs. Mor leads a research group focused on the intersection of technology, media and democracy. The group applies multidisciplinary techniques — from machine learning to qualitative social science — to study our information ecosystem and its challenges. Before Cornell, Mor was on the faculty at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information, led a research team at Yahoo! Research Berkeley, received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Stanford University InfoLab, and played professional basketball for Hapoel Tel Aviv. He is also a former startup co-founder, and advises startup companies in social computing and related areas.
