SRI Seminar Series returns for fall 2022 featuring talks on the ethics of technology
The SRI Seminar Series is a weekly virtual event that convenes the Schwartz Reisman Institute’s community to discuss cutting-edge scholarship at the intersection of technology and society. The 2022 Fall Series begins September 14th with a presentation by Julie Shah, director of MIT’s Interactive Robotics Group. Image: Chris Montgomery, Unsplash.
The Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society’s SRI Seminar Series returns on September 14th, 2022, for its third season. Every Wednesday from 3:10 PM - 4:30 PM ET on Zoom, participants can join leading scholars to explore innovative new research at the intersection of technology and society.
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From AI ethics and human rights to cognitive science and evolutionary biology, SRI’s Seminar Series convenes a broad interdisciplinary community through weekly virtual events that advance cutting-edge ideas and scholarship. Established in 2020, the fall 2022 series will span 12 talks, with the first session featuring Julie Shah of MIT, who will explore what automation means for the future of work and how we can build better jobs alongside intelligent machines.
Sparking new ideas and conversations
“SRI’s weekly seminars are an opportunity to bring new ideas and approaches to our research community, by sharing insights from leading thinkers in a wide range of fields engaged in AI and society and eliciting feedback from colleagues,” said SRI Associate Director Sheila McIlraith, who will moderate several of this season’s events. “These seminars have become a place to engage with others interested in the impacts of technology in our lives, sparking new ideas and conversations.”
To date, SRI Seminars have convened a global audience, with 47 speakers from six countries sharing compelling research and inspiring robust conversations. Leading researchers in areas such as AI ethics, data privacy, computer science, AI safety, economics, psychology, law, philosophy, public policy, and healthcare have contributed to the events to date, extending SRI’s mandate to integrate knowledge across traditional boundaries through interdisciplinary scholarship, and building human-centred solutions to the challenges posed by advanced technologies.
From left to right: Julie Shah (Interactive Robotics Group, MIT), C. Thi Nguyen (University of Utah), Moshe Vardi (Rice University), SRI Associate Director Sheila McIlraith (University of Toronto).
The ethics of automation, transparency, and computer science
In the first three SRI Seminars, guest speakers from MIT, the University of Utah, and Rice University will address new ethical frameworks and issues concerning the future of work, transparency, and computer science.
The season’s first session features Julie Shah, an associate professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT and director of the Interactive Robotics Group at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), who will explore how advances in automation and computation can go hand in hand with improved opportunities and economic security for workers. What decisions around automation can improve life for workers, and how can engineers better account for this?
In the second session, philosopher C. Thi Nguyen of the University of Utah considers how requirements for transparency can enact pressures on expert domains with deeply negative results. As Nguyen provocatively contends, while we need both trust and transparency, these two principles exist in an “essential tension” with one another that generates challenges for both and ultimately requires forms of “painful compromise.”
Rounding out September’s sessions is Moshe Vardi, the Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor of Computational Engineering at Rice University, author of two books and more than 600 technical papers, and a senior editor of Communications of the ACM, the premier publication in computing, focusing on the societal impacts of information technology. In his talk, Vardi will explore how computer scientists should engage ethics through their practice to ensure the benefits of their innovations while appropriately confronting the associated societal costs.
About the SRI Seminar Series
SRI Seminars are held on a weekly basis, with each session featuring a leading or emerging researcher whose work offers new and innovative solutions regarding the impacts of technology on society. Speakers will present for 45 minutes, followed by an open discussion with participants, including SRI’s research community, specialists from other institutions, students, and the general public. Sessions are recorded and subsequently made available on SRI’s YouTube channel.
To attend, participants can register for free via Eventbrite.
Registration is now open for the following upcoming sessions:
September 14, 2022: Julie Shah (MIT), “Human-machine partnerships and work of the future”
September 21, 2022: C. Thi Nguyen (University of Utah), “Transparency is surveillance”
September 28, 2022: Moshe Vardi (Rice University), “How to be an ethical computer scientist”
