Luke Stark is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Information & Media Studies at Western University who researches the ethical, historical, and social impacts of computational technologies, including how these tools mediate social and emotional expression, make inferences about people, and are reshaping our relationships to collective action, our selves, and each other.

Tawanna Dillahunt is an associate professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information whose research spans human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing fields, including environmental, economic, and social sustainability. Dillahunt investigates, designs, builds, enhances, and deploys innovative digital tools to solve real-world problems that support the needs of people from historically excluded groups.

Our weekly SRI Seminar Series welcomes Beth Simone Noveck, a professor at Northeastern University, where she directs the Burnes Center for Social Change and its partner projects, the GovLab, and InnovateUS. Noveck’s work focuses on using AI to reimagine participatory democracy and strengthen governance, and she has spent her career helping institutions incorporate more participatory and open ways of working.

The Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, in collaboration with the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, present Geoffrey Hinton. Please join us in person for this unique opportunity to engage in a scholarly talk and Q&A with one of the key founding figures of artificial intelligence.

Arvind Narayanan is a professor of computer science at Princeton University and the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy. Narayanan led the Princeton Web Transparency and Accountability Project to uncover how companies collect and use personal information, and his work was among the first to show how machine learning reflects cultural stereotypes.

While our data-intensive world is here to stay, does it come at the cost of our humanity in terms of autonomy, community, dignity, and equality? Join Wendy H. Wong in conversation with Anna Su about the insights in Wong’s new book “We, The Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age” (MIT Press).

Regina Rini is an associate professor of philosophy at York University, and a Canada Research Chair in Social and Moral Cognition. Rini teaches and writes on a number of topics at the intersection of normative theory and social science, with a focus on the relevance of cognitive science to moral theory.

Marzieh Fadaee is a senior research scientist at Cohere For AI, a non-profit research lab that seeks to solve complex machine learning problems and create more points of entry into machine learning research. Fadaee’s work is broadly interested in all aspects of natural language understanding, particularly in multilingual learning, data-conscious learning, robust and scalable models, compositionality, and interpretability.

Salomé Viljoen is an assistant professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School who studies the information economy, the social impacts of automation, and how legal structures impact inequality. Viljoen’s current work is on the political economy of social data, including its legal status and implications, and algorithmic governance, particularly the use of economic optimization methods in relation to algorithmic fairness.

Shion Guha is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information and Department of Computer Science, and a 2023 SRI faculty fellow. Guha’s research interests are broadly in the nascent field of human-centered data science, which he helped develop, including the role of algorithmic decision-making in public services.

Aaron Hertzmann is a principal scientist at Adobe Research and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington who is an expert in computer graphics, machine learning, and art. In this session, Hertzmann will discuss questions of authorship raised by generative AI tools that are able to create images, enabling new modes of artistic expression. Can AI algorithms be considered artists? Hertzmann will explore this issue in relation to previous technological developments, as well as the role of art as a social phenomenon.