The Ian P. Sharp Lectureship was established at the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto in 1989 through a gift from I.P. Sharp Associates Ltd. (A Reuters Company). It is intended to bring internationally renowned individuals to the campus to explore the transformative effects of information practice. The lectures, which are open to the profession and members of the public, are delivered every three to four years by a distinguished figure in information science and related fields.
In 2024, the lecture returns through a partnership between the Faculty of Information and the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. The 2024 Ian P. Sharp Lecturer is Beth Simone Noveck, a professor at Northeastern University where she directs the Burnes Center for Social Change and its partner project The GovLab. Noveck is faculty at the Institute for Experiential AI, School of Law, and in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, the College of Arts, Design, and Media, the College of Engineering, and affiliated faculty at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences.
The lecture will be hosted as the closing session for Absolutely Interdisciplinary 2024, SRI’s annual academic conference. The lecture will be followed by a reception. Admission is free, but registration is required. Everyone is welcome.
Talk title:
“From ballots to bots: AI’s transformative role in democratic societies.”
Absolutely Interdisciplinary 2024:
Graduate Workshop: May 6, 2024 (online only)
Main Conference: May 7-8, 2024 (in person only)
The Ian P. Sharp Lecture with invited speaker Beth Simone Noveck: May 8, 2024, 5:00 PM – 8:30 PM (in person only): “From ballots to bots: AI’s transformative role in democratic societies.”
Date:
Wednesday, May 8, 2024, 5:00 PM – 8:30 PM
Venue:
Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus, University of Toronto
108 College St., Toronto, ON M5G 1L7
Please note this event will be held in-person only.
About the speaker
Beth Simone Noveck is a professor at Northeastern University, where she directs the Burnes Center for Social Change and its partner project, The GovLab. She is faculty at the Institute for Experiential AI, School of Law, and in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, the College of Arts, Design, and Media, the College of Engineering, and affiliated faculty at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences.
At Northeastern, Beth directs AI for Impact, and its InnovateMA co-op program in partnership with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Through AI for Impact, students use artificial intelligence and human-centered design to deliver cutting-edge projects that solve public sector problems and improve lives.
Beth’s work focuses on using AI to reimagine participatory democracy and strengthen governance, and she has spent her career helping institutions incorporate more equitable and open ways of working using new technology. Together with Citizens Foundation, she is designing and building AI-enabled tools to enhance collective intelligence and participatory problem solving. She blogs about AI, democracy and governance at Reboot Democracy.
In 2024, Governor Murphy appointed her as Chief AI Strategist for the State of New Jersey. Previously, she served as the State’s founding Chief Innovation Officer. In that role, Beth and her team used new technology to improve equitable government delivery of services. The Office of Innovation worked with partner agencies to modernize unemployment insurance, provide a whole-of-government response to COVID, collect real-time infection data, deliver everything needed to start, run and grow a business, and use open data to provide training information to job seekers and improve uptake of benefits, services and permits. She also served as Chair of the State's Future of Work Task Force.
Previously, Beth served in the White House as the first United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer under President Obama. She founded the White House Open Government Initiative, which worked across government to create policies and platforms, such as data.gov and challenge.gov, for making the federal government more transparent, participatory, and collaborative. She previously served on the Library of Congress Kluge Scholars Council and the Global Commission on Internet Governance.
She served as senior advisor for Open Government for UK Prime Minister David Cameron, and between 2018-2021, she served on Chancellor Angela Merkel's Digital Council. Among her many early civic technology projects, she created Unchat, one of the first online platforms for democratic engagement, and Peer-to-Patent to connect scientists to policymakers to improve the patent process. Two decades before the Metaverse, she designed Democracy Island in Second Life and later such projects as OrgPedia to foster corporate transparency or Ask A Scientist to crowdsource answers to COVID questions in collaboration with Federation of American Scientists and other uses of civic tech to deliver better government services. She also founded and hosted the State of Play conferences on law, games and virtual worlds.
In addition to her current course on AI for Impact, Beth is the founder of open, online courses such as Solving Public Problems for social innovators in over 100 countries, Open Justice for legal innovators, and InnovateUS for public sector professionals. InnovateUS delivers free, philanthropically-funded training in AI, innovation and problem-solving skills designed to help improve how public professionals make policy and delivery services.
The author of three earlier books, including Solving Public Problems: How to Fix Our Government and Change Our World (Yale Press 2021) (named a Best Book of 2021 by Stanford Social Innovation Review), Beth’s newest book is Democracy Rebooted: How AI Can Save Democracy.
She was named one of the “Foreign Policy 100” by Foreign Policy, one of Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business”, a “Top Women in Technology” by Huffington Post, and one of the World's 100 Most Influential Academics in Government by Apolitical. She was awarded the doctorat honoris causa from the University of Geneva in October 2023.
You can find her latest TEDx talk here and her TEDTalk here.
About the Faculty of Information
The Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto is one of the world’s foremost information schools, educating information professionals and leading the way in research. Its programs and researchers address topics such as information organization and access, data science, human-computer interaction, cultural heritage institutions, artificial intelligence, and information integrity.
About the Schwartz Reisman Institute
Located at the University of Toronto, the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society’s mission is to deepen our knowledge of technologies, societies, and what it means to be human by integrating research across traditional boundaries and building human-centred solutions that really make a difference. The integrative research we conduct rethinks technology’s role in society, the contemporary needs of human communities, and the systems that govern them. We’re investigating how best to align technology with human values and deploy it accordingly. The human-centred solutions we build are actionable and practical, highlighting the potential of emerging technologies to serve the public good while protecting citizens and societies from their misuse. We want to make sure powerful technologies truly make the world a better place—for everyone.