Are you a U of T researcher who is passionate about ensuring new technologies are effective, safe, ethical, and fair? The Schwartz Reisman Institute welcomes faculty and graduate fellowship applications from U of T researchers from all academic disciplines spanning the sciences, social sciences, and humanities.

Schwartz Reisman Director Gillian Hadfield argues that current approaches towards explainable AI are insufficient for users. What is needed instead is “justifiable AI” that can show how the decisions of an AI system are justifiable according the rules and norms of our society.

A proposed new tool aims to aggregate commercial data to enable a safe re-opening of Toronto’s Financial District. But the project raises questions around usability and privacy, as well as concerns about its value, risks, and feasibility. SRI reports on a Solutions Workshop with findings relevant to broader implications for data sharing and privacy.

In the second of two posts, Leslie Regan Shade, Monica Jean Henderson, and Katie Mackinnon explore research on children’s and youth’s experiences of online spaces, their needs for privacy protection, and how conceptions of digital tools and the corporations that make them can be better informed through digital literacy.

In the first of two posts, Leslie Regan Shade, Monica Jean Henderson, and Katie Mackinnon explore the implications of Bill C-11 in terms of impacts on digital privacy for youth and children. The authors reflect on the need to balance online risks and opportunities for minors in the context of their research with The eQuality Project.

When we say that something is good or bad, is that a claim about objective facts, or something dependent on our perspective? Guest blogger Cory Travers Lewis reflects on Denis Walsh’s way of thinking about norms—one which treats them as both objective facts and as dependent on the perspective of particular living things.

In a new op-ed for The Globe and Mail, SRI Faculty Affiliate Marlène Koffi explains how Canada’s ongoing internet-connection crisis has highlighted many existing social inequities during the COVID-19 pandemic. To correct this, Koffi argues government must update its data collection methods and invest in public-private partnerships.

SRI Graduate Fellow Shabnam Haghzare reflects on Joanna J. Bryson’s seminar about AI ethics, AI as human-authored tool, and the need for AI regulation in the service of public good. Bryson is professor of ethics and technology at the Hertie School in Berlin.

“How do we adapt our systems of rules to keep up with social and economic change?” Gillian K. Hadfield contributes to The Toronto Star’s Saturday Debate, exploring whether or not we should fear artificial intelligence and describing the regulatory technologies that are required to help us keep AI in check.

AI governance is urgently needed to ensure that its benefits to humanity outweigh its risks of causing harm. AI governance can also help evolve our legal and regulatory systems so they do not impede innovation. “Innovating AI Governance: Bold Action and Novel Approaches” is an ongoing series of workshops developed by SRI in collaboration with the Rockefeller Foundation to address this problem.

“Views on Techno-Utopia” will bring together early career scholars in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities to follow the promises and perils of emerging technologies—particularly AI, platforms, and surveillance tech—through the lens of techno-utopianism. Learn more about the 2021 SRI Grad Workshop, including description, submission instructions, dates and deadlines, and more.

SRI privacy experts propose a shift to regulating “information about persons” provides better architecture to rethink contemporary privacy risks and develop a data governance framework suited to the 21st century. Part of an ongoing series of commentaries on the features, implications, and controversies surrounding privacy law reforms in an increasingly digital and data-rich context.