BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//UM ESC - ECPv6.15.16//NONSGML v1.0//EN CALSCALE:GREGORIAN METHOD:PUBLISH X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://esc.umich.edu X-WR-CALDESC:Events for UM ESC REFRESH-INTERVAL;VALUE=DURATION:PT1H X-Robots-Tag:noindex X-PUBLISHED-TTL:PT1H BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Detroit BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT DTSTART:20190310T070000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 TZNAME:EST DTSTART:20191103T060000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT DTSTART:20200308T070000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 TZNAME:EST DTSTART:20201101T060000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT DTSTART:20210314T070000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 TZNAME:EST DTSTART:20211107T060000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT DTSTART:20220313T070000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 TZNAME:EST DTSTART:20221106T060000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT DTSTART:20230312T070000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 TZNAME:EST DTSTART:20231105T060000 END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20220407T090000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20220408T170000 DTSTAMP:20260615T060810 CREATED:20220214T015513Z LAST-MODIFIED:20220406T012532Z UID:2557-1649322000-1649437200@esc.umich.edu SUMMARY:Symposium: Social Media Influencers and the New Political Economy in South Asia and Africa DESCRIPTION:HOW TO ATTENDThis event will be held from 9:00am – 5:00pm EST on April 7 and April 8. Symposium participants may attend either in-person (Room 2435\, North Quad) or virtually; registration is required. For additional details (including a list of confirmed speakers) and to register:  https://joyojeet.people.si.umich.edu/influencers.htm. ABOUTSocial media influencer activity on platforms such as YouTube\, Twitter\, Instagram\, Facebook\, TikTok\, and LinkedIn are now pivotal to social influence in societies around the world\, as the ecology of the public sphere gets increasingly crafted\, amplified\, or negated by what happens online. This is as true\, or more so in the Global South\, where social media has often served as the gateway for entry into the online realm for millions of technology users with little or no prior experience. The resulting world is one in which the boundaries between the physical and the virtual has fundamentally reshaped power equations between the citizens and the state\, their culture\, and their communities. This symposium at the University of Michigan is focused on social media influencers\, and brings a host of leaders\, artistes\, journalists\, activists\, commentators\, and scholars from two of the fastest growing Internet-using regions of the world to discuss how they interact online\, what drives their activities and success\, and how being public figures online impacts their lives and work. This event has been organized by ESC affiliated faculty Joyojeet Pal (School of Information\, University of Michigan) and Omolade Adunbi (DAAS\, University of Michigan). It is co-sponsored by ESC; the Center for South Asian Studies; the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies; Rackham Graduate School; the African Studies Center; the College of Literature\, Science\, and the Arts; and the School of Information. URL:https://esc.umich.edu/event/symposium-social-media-influencers-and-the-new-political-economy-in-south-asia-and-africa/ LOCATION:Room 2435\, North Quad\, 105 State Street\, Ann Arbor\, MI\, 48104\, United States END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20220321T163000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20220321T180000 DTSTAMP:20260615T060810 CREATED:20220308T031003Z LAST-MODIFIED:20220308T031003Z UID:2588-1647880200-1647885600@esc.umich.edu SUMMARY:Cultivating socially responsible engineers: The role of universities and public policy DESCRIPTION:HOW TO PARTICIPATEIn-person attendance is limited to current University of Michigan students\, faculty\, and staff. All in-person attendees must register\, and will be required to complete the ResponsiBlue screening before entering the building. Masks are required. The event will also be livestreamed for those outside of the University\, or University members who choose not to attend in-person. To register or access the livestream: https://fordschool.umich.edu/event/2022/cultivating-socially-responsible-engineers-role-universities-and-public-policy. ABOUTJoin STPP for a panel discussion that will convene leaders in academia and government working in the field of public interest technology to discuss the role of universities and public policy in cultivating socially responsible engineers. They will focus on what needs to change in STEM education policy to center equity and justice in the training of the next generation of scientists and technologists. PANELISTS Amy Ko\, Professor\, Information School\, University of Washington-Seattle Amy J. Ko is a Professor at the University of Washington Information School and an Adjunct Professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. She directs the Code & Cognition Lab\, where she and her students study CS education\, human-computer interaction\, and humanity’s individual and collective struggle to understand computing and harness it for equity and justice. Her earliest work included techniques for automatically answering questions about program behavior to support debugging\, program understanding\, and reuse. Her later work studied interactions between developers and users\, and techniques for web scale aggregation of user intent through help systems; she co-founded AnswerDash to commercialize these ideas. Her latest work investigates effective\, equitable\, and inclusive ways for humanity to learn computing\, especially how data\, algorithms\, APIs\, and AI can both empower and oppress. Her work spans more than 140 peer-reviewed publications\, with 13 receiving best paper awards and 4 receiving most influential paper awards. She is an ACM Senior Member\, and member of ACM SIGCHI\, SIGCSE\, and SIGSOFT. She received her Ph.D. at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in 2008\, and degrees in Computer Science and Psychology with Honors from Oregon State University in 2002. Tim McKay\, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education; Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Physics\, Astronomy\, and Education; University of Michigan Tim McKay is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Physics\, Astronomy\, and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education in the College of Literature\, Science\, and the Arts\, and Professor of Education in the School of Education at the University of Michigan. McKay received a BS in Physics from Temple University\, where he was a first-generation\, commuter student. He received his PhD in Physics from the University of Chicago in 1992\, and joined the faculty at Michigan in 1995. McKay’s team has applied observational and experimental data science methods to astrophysics\, cosmology\, and education. They have probed the growth of cosmic structure as well as the expansion history of the Universe\, especially through studies of galaxy clusters and gravitational lensing. They have discovered prompt optical counterparts to gamma-ray bursts. Since 2008\, they have been using classroom and institutional data to make higher education more equitable\, inclusive\, and effective. In the last few years\, McKay has helped to launch the Foundational Course Initiative\, the Sloan Equity and Inclusion in STEM Introductory Courses (SEISMIC) project\, and the Mellon College and Beyond II study. Johanna Okerland\, Postdoctoral Fellow\, Ford School of Public Policy\, University of Michigan Johanna is a Human-Computer Interaction researcher with a background in Computer Science and additional training in Science Technology Studies and Public Policy. As a postdoc at U-M working with the Science and Technology Public Policy program and the Computer Science department\, Johanna has been developing ways to bring ethics and justice into CS courses and contribute to ongoing research about the societal implications of emerging technology. She plans to continue approaching technology from a critical interdisciplinary perspective and creating spaces for students to do the same. José Zayas-Castro\, Division Director\, NSF Division of Engineering Education and Centers\, National Science Foundation Dr. José Luis Zayas-Castro joined the NSF on August 2\, 2021 as division director for the Division of Engineering Education and Centers. Prior to joining NSF\, during nearly two decades at University of San Francisco (USF)\, he served as a department chair and as associate dean for research in the College of Engineering and in various leadership positions at the USF Center for Entrepreneurship. Previously\, he was a professor and co-director of the diversity in engineering program at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He began his faculty career at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez (UPRM)\, where he led activities in manufacturing\, innovation\, and academic and research affairs. Zayas-Castro’s main research interests are in healthcare systems engineering\, manufacturing systems\, engineering entrepreneurship\, and economic and cost systems. He has experience with small businesses as well as partnerships with industry\, non-profit foundations\, and international organizations. Zayas-Castro received his bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from UPRM\, and his master’s in industrial and management engineering\, master’s in business administration\, and doctorate in management from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Zayas-Castro is a Fellow of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers\, a member of the Pan-American Academy of Engineering\, and is also very active in the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS). Among his numerous awards\, in 2006 he received the Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education. He has been recognized for mentoring\, advising\, and diversity initiatives. Moderator: Alec Gallimore\, Robert J. Vlasic Dean of Engineering\, University of Michigan Dr. Alec D. Gallimore is the Robert J. Vlasic Dean of Engineering at the University of Michigan. Dean Gallimore is a rocket scientist\, and in 2019 was elected to the National Academy of Engineering–among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer. He earned a BS in Aeronautical Engineering from Rensselaer (RPI)\, and MA and Ph.D. degrees in Aerospace Engineering with a focus on plasma physics from Princeton. He is the Richard F. and Eleanor A. Towner Professor of Engineering\, an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering\, and founder and co-director of the Plasmadynamics and Electric Propulsion Laboratory (PEPL). He is also a member of the Applied Physics faculty. He is co-founder of ElectroDynamic Applications\, Inc. (EDA)\, a high-tech aerospace firm in Ann Arbor\, specializing in plasma device engineering.   This event is hosted by the Science\, Technology & Public Policy (STPP) Program and the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy as part of the STPP Lecture Series\, with support from the Public Interest Technology University Network. It is co-sponsored by the Center for Ethics\, Society\, and Computing (ESC)\, Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS)\, Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences (NERS)\, and Michigan Engineering. URL:https://esc.umich.edu/event/cultivating-socially-responsible-engineers-the-role-of-universities-and-public-policy/ LOCATION:Betty Ford Auditorium 1110 Weill Hall\, 735 S. State St.\, Ann Arbor\, MI\, 48109\, United States END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20220221T160000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20220221T170000 DTSTAMP:20260615T060810 CREATED:20220128T224153Z LAST-MODIFIED:20220218T190511Z UID:2523-1645459200-1645462800@esc.umich.edu SUMMARY:Virginia Dignum: Responsible AI - From Principles to Action DESCRIPTION:HOW TO PARTICIPATEThis event will be held on Zoom: https://umich.zoom.us/j/94087281082 TITLEResponsible AI: From Principles to Action SPEAKER Virginia Dignum\, Professor\, Wallenberg Chair in Responsible AI\, Umeå University ABSTRACTEvery day we see news about advances and the societal impact of AI. AI is changing the way we work\, live and solve challenges but concerns about fairness\, transparency or privacy are also growing. Ensuring AI ethics is more than designing systems whose result can be trusted. It is about the way we design them\, why we design them\, and who is involved in designing them. In order to develop and use AI responsibly\, we need to work towards technical\, societal\, institutional and legal methods and tools which provide concrete support to AI practitioners\, as well as awareness and training to enable participation of all\, to ensure the alignment of AI systems with our societies’ principles and values. This event is part of the MIDAS Seminar Series\, and is co-presented by the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) and ESC. URL:https://esc.umich.edu/event/virginia-dignum-responsible-ai-from-principles-to-action/ END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20220217T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20220217T210000 DTSTAMP:20260615T060810 CREATED:20220208T042208Z LAST-MODIFIED:20220217T150336Z UID:2534-1645124400-1645131600@esc.umich.edu SUMMARY:ESC Watch Party: Hackers DESCRIPTION:HOW TO PARTICIPATEThis event is restricted to participants at the University of Michigan\, and will be held on Zoom: https://umich.zoom.us/j/96950614303 DETAILSWhen an evil corporate programmer frames a group of teenaged hackers for his own plot\, they must use their coding skills to avoid arrest and prevent a computer virus from capsizing a fleet of oil tankers… ESC is holding our first movie night\, and we’re starting with a computing cult classic: Hackers (1995)! Participants are encouraged to pick their own hacker aliases for the evening (think “Crash Override\,” “Cereal Killer\,” and “Acid Burn”)\, and ESC-themed prizes will be up for grabs as we play Hackers bingo. URL:https://esc.umich.edu/event/esc-watch-party-hackers/ END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20211116T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20211116T190000 DTSTAMP:20260615T060810 CREATED:20211110T023727Z LAST-MODIFIED:20211110T150113Z UID:2456-1637082000-1637089200@esc.umich.edu SUMMARY:ESC Zoom: An IRL Mixer DESCRIPTION:The Center for Ethics\, Society\, and Computing (ESC)Invites ESC faculty and student researchers\nand their UM ESC-Curious Guest to Bløm Meadworks(https://www.drinkblom.com)\n100 S. 4th Avenue\, A2 48104 (map) 5:00 – 7:00 pm\, Tuesday\, November 16 Heated Patio\, Food\, and Drinks Please RSVP by Sunday\, November 14Please fill out the RSVP once for yourself and once again for a guest. Masks required indoors. Proof of vaccination required.\n(Vaccination card\, photo of card or ResponsiBLUE app) URL:https://esc.umich.edu/event/esc-zoom-an-irl-mixer/ CATEGORIES:Mixer END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20211115T160000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20211115T170000 DTSTAMP:20260615T060810 CREATED:20211026T142840Z LAST-MODIFIED:20211105T165049Z UID:2373-1636992000-1636995600@esc.umich.edu SUMMARY:Rebecca Fiebrink -- How machine learning can support human creators DESCRIPTION:A keynote address at the online UM Data Science and AI Symposium. HOW TO PARTICIPATERegistration is required but this symposium is free and open to the public. Click the link at the top of the event page (https://midas.umich.edu/2021-symposium/) to register. TITLEHow machine learning can support human creators SPEAKERDr. Rebecca Fiebrink\nReader\, Creative Computing Institute | University of the Arts London SHORT BIODr. Fiebrink’s research focuses on human-computer interaction\, machine learning\, and signal processing all to allow people to apply machine learning to new areas such as designing new musical instruments or gestural interfaces for accessibility. She is also involved in digital humanities scholarship and machine learning education. This event is organized by MIDAS. For more information\, see https://midas.umich.edu/2021-symposium/ \, URL:https://esc.umich.edu/event/rebecca-fiebrink-at-u-m-data-science-and-ai-symposium/ END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20211111T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20211111T130000 DTSTAMP:20260615T060810 CREATED:20211104T150806Z LAST-MODIFIED:20211104T153816Z UID:2435-1636632000-1636635600@esc.umich.edu SUMMARY:Kalindi Vora: Anti-Racist AI DESCRIPTION:HOW TO PARTICIPATEZoom Meeting ID: 931 5248 3217 (LINK) Passcode: 331064 (Note: For this event\, the number of Zoom participants outside of the University of Michigan is limited on a first-come\, first-served basis. If you do not have a umich.edu Zoom login the event may be full.) TITLEAnti-racist AI SPEAKERKalindi Vora\, Yale ABSTRACTThis talk looks at the history of intelligence and race science to consider how these becomes embedded in approaches to developing machine intelligence. I argue that the design of commercial machines that interact socially with humans inscribes histories of racial capitalism\, imperialism\, and colonization onto projected future social and material worlds as machines become infrastructure for how we become human subjects. These critiques create a position from which to think pragmatically about how to change technology design imaginaries towards anti-racism. Feminist science and technology studies scholars have scrutinized the relation between human and non-human as a key point for understanding how social and political context and the material world coproduce one another. Insights from women of color feminisms\, feminist materialism\, postcolonial feminisms\, indigenous feminism and Black feminism about the role of embodiment\, imagination\, and labor point out the danger and inaccuracy of taking the material world as given\, even though scientific practice insists on just that. I’ll conclude by sharing thought experiments I’ve done with students on what a non-colonized\, anti-racist feminist artificial intelligence could be\, and by raising some unanswerable questions about intelligence in hopes that we can discuss the potential to challenge the seeming givenness of our colonized world and the way it shapes new technologies. SPEAKER BIOKalindi Vora is Visiting Professor of Gender\, Sexuality and Women’s Studies\, and of Ethnicity Race and Migration at Yale University\, with secondary appointment in History of Science and Medicine. She is Professor of Gender\, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at UC Davis\, and Director of the Feminist Research Institute\, and affiliate faculty of Science and Technology Studies. She is author of Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor (2015; winner of the 4S 2018 Rachel Carson book prize); and with Neda Atanasoski\, Surrogate Humanity: Race\, Robots and the Politics of Technological Futures\, (Duke University Press\, 2019). Her current research includes study of feminist approaches to artificial intelligence and robotics engineering\, and developing approaches to antiracist STEM research training informed by ethnic studies and STS research. Her PhD is from History of Consciousness\, UC Santa Cruz (Feminist Studies)\, and her MA in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Hawai‘i Manoa. She also held the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Berkeley Anthropology. Her publications appear in journals including Current Anthropology\, The South Atlantic Quarterly\, Somatechnics\, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology\, Postmodern Culture\, Radical Philosophy\, and Catalyst: Feminism\, Theory\, Technoscience. This event is sponsored by the University of Michigan School of Information. URL:https://esc.umich.edu/event/kalindi-vora-anti-racist-ai/ CATEGORIES:Visiting Speaker END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20211109T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20211109T130000 DTSTAMP:20260615T060810 CREATED:20211104T151542Z LAST-MODIFIED:20211104T153929Z UID:2439-1636459200-1636462800@esc.umich.edu SUMMARY:Rachel Kuo: Solidarities Across Platforms DESCRIPTION:HOW TO PARTICIPATEZoom Meeting ID: 930 5981 3180 (LINK) Passcode: 704289 (Note: For this event\, the number of Zoom participants outside of the University of Michigan is limited on a first-come\, first-served basis. If you do not have a umich.edu Zoom login the event may be full.) TITLESolidarities Across Platforms: Racial Politics and Information Practices SPEAKERRachel Kuo\, NYU ABSTRACTInformation practices are integral to grassroots organizing\, including how collectives collect data for contact lists; manage money and distribute resources; and design graphics. This presentation uses examples from racial justice movements that critique state-sanctioned violence in order to address how race and power is embedded in technologies and how creative information practices interact with structures of power. Different practices of information sharing\, access\, and production function as collective sites for people to negotiate racial politics across differences. For example\, during moments of heightened racial violence\, Asian American organizers make use of different data narratives to shift racial alignments to be in political relation with Black liberation movements. Using archival materials\, ethnographic fieldwork\, interviews\, and examples from community-based research\, this talk also draws our attention to the administrative and technical labor and care work in movement building to account for the ways that power operates relationally within movement spaces and the differential relationships that people have with technologies. SPEAKER BIORachel Kuo writes\, teaches\, and researches race\, social movements\, and digital technology. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Information\, Technology\, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Visiting Scholar at Duke University’s Asian American and Diasporic Studies program. She is a founding member of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies and a current Fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology. She is also a co-founder of the Asian American Feminist Collective. Her writing on race\, technology\, and politics has been published in New Media and Society\, Social Media + Society\, Big Data & Society\, ACM Interactions\, Journal of Communication\, as well as Teen Vogue and TruthOut. She has a PhD in Media\, Culture\, and Communication from New York University. This event is sponsored by the University of Michigan School of Information. URL:https://esc.umich.edu/event/rachel-kuo-solidarities-across-platforms-racial-politics-and-information-practices/ CATEGORIES:Visiting Speaker END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20211105T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20211105T130000 DTSTAMP:20260615T060810 CREATED:20211104T145611Z LAST-MODIFIED:20211104T154058Z UID:2428-1636113600-1636117200@esc.umich.edu SUMMARY:Roderic Crooks: "People's Community Control of Modern Technology" DESCRIPTION:HOW TO PARTICIPATEZoom Meeting ID: 992 9521 5958 (LINK) Passcode: 661093 (Note: For this event\, the number of Zoom participants outside of the University of Michigan is limited on a first-come\, first-served basis. If you do not have a umich.edu Zoom login the event may be full.) TITLE“People’s Community Control of Modern Technology”: Community Organizers and Data Justice SPEAKERRoderic Crooks\, UC Irvine ABSTRACTRecent widespread public protests in the United States against police violence\, racism\, and other issues demonstrate the importance of community organizing\, grassroots activism dedicated to building voice and political power. Community organizers work in all part of the American political spectrum\, but they share an approach to democratic participation\, a professional culture\, and many job-specific tools and techniques. Community organizers have also made extensive use of a less obvious political tool: data. Contemporary community organizers in working-class communities of color\, like other kinds of data professionals\, create\, aggregate\, and visualize data in order to inform organizational activities\, to communicate with various audiences\, and to demonstrate their value to funders and the public. Paradoxically\, many of the same community organizers also criticize via their work the design\, development\, and use of data-intensive technologies in a variety of domains\, including law enforcement\, public education\, public health\, and pandemic response. In this talk\, I will report preliminary findings of an ongoing research project that seeks to describe and understand the data practices of community organizers in working-class communities of color\, focusing in particular on the risks organizers and community members must address in their pursuit of racial justice projects that turn on uses of data.   SPEAKER BIORoderic Crooks is an assistant professor in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine. His research examines how the use of digital technology by public institutions contributes to the minoritization of working-class communities of color. His current project explores how community organizers in working-class communities of color use data for activist projects\, even as they dispute the proliferation of data-intensive technologies in education\, law enforcement\, financial services\, and other vital sites of public life. He has published extensively in HCI\, STS\, and social science venues on topics including political theories of online participation\, equity of access to information and media technologies\, and document theory.   This event is sponsored by the University of Michigan School of Information. URL:https://esc.umich.edu/event/roderic-crooks-peoples-community-control-of-modern-technology-community-organizers-and-data-justice/ CATEGORIES:Visiting Speaker END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20211025T160000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20211025T173000 DTSTAMP:20260615T060810 CREATED:20211025T142811Z LAST-MODIFIED:20211025T142915Z UID:2368-1635177600-1635183000@esc.umich.edu SUMMARY:Karen Levy: RoboTruckers DESCRIPTION:FOR REMOTE PARTICIPANTS\nThis talk is restricted to participants at the University of Michigan. This talk will be held LIVE online via Zoom. To join\, you must use a link from a University of Michigan mailing list or a printed flyer. To obtain a link\, sign up to our mailing list at the bottom of this page (see: “Sign up for e-mail announcements to learn more.”). \nKaren Levy: RoboTruckers — The Double Threat of AI for Low-Wage Work\n  \nABSTRACT\nMuch attention has been paid to the risk artificial intelligence poses to employment\, particularly in low-wage industries. The question has invited well-placed concern from policymakers\, as the prospect of millions of low-skilled workers finding themselves suddenly without employment brings with it the potential for tremendous social and economic disruption. Long-haul truck driving is perceived as a prime target for such displacement\, due to the fast-developing technical capabilities of autonomous vehicles (many of which lend themselves to the specific needs of truck driving)\, characteristics of trucking labor\, and the political economy of the industry. In most of the public rhetoric about the threat of the self-driving truck\, the trucker is seen as a displaced party. He is displaced both physically and economically: removed from the cab of the truck\, and from his means of economic provision. The robot has replaced his imperfect\, disobedient\, tired\, and inefficient body\, rendering him redundant\, irrelevant\, and jobless. But the reality is more complicated. The intrusion of automation into the truck cab certainly presents a threat to the trucker\, but the threat is not solely or even primarily experienced\, as it is so often described\, as displacement. The trucker is still in the cab\, doing the work of truck driving—but he is joined there by intelligent systems that monitor his body directly. Hats that monitor his brain waves and head position\, vests that track his heart rate\, cameras trained on his eyelids for signs of fatigue or inattention: these systems flash lights in his face\, jolt his seat\, and send reports to his dispatcher or even his family members should the trucker’s focus waver. As more trucking firms integrate such technologies into their safety programs\, truckers are not being displaced by intelligent systems so much as they are experiencing the emergence of intelligent systems as a compelled hybridization\, a very intimate incursion into their work and bodies. This paper considers the dual\, conflicting narratives of job replacement by robots and of bodily integration with robots\, to assess the true range of AI’s potential effects on low-wage work. \n \n\nSPEAKER BIO\nKaren Levy is an Assistant Professor of Information Science at Cornell University and Associated Faculty at Cornell Law School. She is a sociologist and lawyer whose research focuses on legal\, social\, and ethical dimensions of data-intensive technologies \n. \nThis event is organized by the Science\, Technology\, and Society (STS) Program and co-sponsored by ESC. URL:https://esc.umich.edu/event/karen-levy-robotruckers/ END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20211015T103000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20211015T160000 DTSTAMP:20260615T060810 CREATED:20211015T142121Z LAST-MODIFIED:20211015T142833Z UID:2352-1634293800-1634313600@esc.umich.edu SUMMARY:Building Equitable Ecologies of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning DESCRIPTION:Building Equitable Ecologies of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning\nOctober 15\, 2021 10:30am-4:00pm\, Hybrid\n\n\n \nBig Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have become a major force that impacts our daily lives in essential ways\, from how political messaging and marketing are designed\, to automating the process of deciding who gets hired or which neighborhood should be intensely patrolled. Big Data and AI can be an important agent for social justice and equality; or they can also be used to perpetuate injustice and hurt populations that are already disadvantaged and marginalized. Artists have been at the fore­front\, together with scientists\, in explor­ing ways in which AI sys­tems can be more equi­table\, trans­par­ent and inclu­sive. This mini–symposium brings lead­ing voices in the field together\, and is inspired by two projects at U-M: \nStephanie Dinkins: On Love & Data\, the first survey exhibition of this prominent transmedia artist whose work creates platforms for dialogue about AI as it intersects race\, gender\, aging and future histories. This exhibit is organized by Stamps Gallery\, Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design\, from August 27 to October 23\, 2021 and generously supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. \n\nFair Representation in Arts and in Data\, a collaboration between data scientists\, artists and museum curators and funded by the U-M President’s Arts Initiative\, the project team uses facial recognition technology to consider both the limitations of racial representation within UMMA’s collection and the limitations of the technology itself. The results culminate in an exhibit\, “White Cube / Black Box”\, which will open at U-M Museum of Art on October 16\, 2021.\n\n\n \nPROGRAM\nOctober 15 \n10:30am  Opening Remarks – Zoom \n10:40-noon  Stephanie Dinkins\, Keynote and Q&A – Zoom \n12:30-1:45  Art\, Machine Learning and Data Justice Panel Discussion – Zoom \nSophia Brueckner\nAssociate Professor\, Stamps School of Art & Design \nH.V. Jagadish\nDirector\, Michigan Institute for Data Science \nDiana Nucera (Mother Cyborg)\nArtist\, Founder and Director of the Equitable Internet Initiative \nSrimoyee Mitra [Moderator] Director\, Stamps Gallery\, U-M \n\n2:30-4:00 Data Science and Machine Learn­ing for Artists work­shop\nU-M Museum of Art\, 525 S State St\, Ann Arbor \nThis will be a non-technical exploration of methods and possibilities for the use of data science and machine learning in the arts. We will cover a few of the ways that creative works can be viewed as data\, and consider how methods for learning from data can be used to advance creation and insight in the arts.  Students pursuing degrees at all levels in any field of arts are especially encouraged to attend. No prior exposure to data science or machine learning is expected. \nKerby Shed­den\,\nDirector\, Consulting for Statistics\, Computing\, and Analytics Research; Pro­fes­sor of Sta­tis­tics\, U-M \n\nGo to https://midas.umich.edu/art-data-science-mini-symposium/ to register and learn more. URL:https://esc.umich.edu/event/building-equitable-ecologies-of-artificial-intelligence-and-machine-learning/ END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20210611T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20210611T133000 DTSTAMP:20260615T060810 CREATED:20210414T035403Z LAST-MODIFIED:20210416T194515Z UID:2219-1623412800-1623418200@esc.umich.edu SUMMARY:Living in a Carceral State DESCRIPTION:HOW TO PARTICIPATEThis Zoom webinar is free and open to the public. Register here. TITLELiving in a Carceral State SUMMARYThe twenty-first century carceral state inspires anxieties of a national or even global-scale panopticon. Omniscient and omnipresent technologies report our movements\, purchases\, communications\, and even desires to invisible and unaccountable corporations and government agencies (the public/private distinction having lost effective meaning). In practice\, however\, some people are obviously more vulnerable to coercive state power than others; intrusive surveillance techniques predate the Internet; and socio-technical systems routinely fail. Moreover\, while middle-class consumers fret over exposure of their digital lives\, prisoners labor in the shadows of material walls that obstruct democratic oversight. This panel investigates the experiences of the state’s target populations to better understand the mundane ways people negotiate\, evade\, reproduce\, and resist carceral infrastructures.   PANELISTS Taxonomies of Surveillance\, from E-Carceration to the Apple Watch Chris Gilliard\, Macomb Community College. The array of technologies\, from ankle monitors to probation apps\, that are deployed against formerly incarcerated people are sometimes given the name “e-carceration.” These range from technologies that persistently track location to those with microphones which can be activated at any time\, and even devices equipped with “artificial intelligence” which collect biometric data and claim to have the ability to predict recidivism. These technologies are deeply invasive and extractive and are a far cry from the ostensibly more compassionate form of carcerality they espouse. Building off the Carceral Tech Resistance Network’s formulation that “carceral technologies are those that are bound up in the control\, coercion\, capture\, and exile of entire categories of people”\, we might consider how these systems fit along a surveillant spectrum between “imposed” carceral surveillance on the one hand\, and “luxury” surveillance\, such as Apple Watches\, Oura Rings\, and FitBits\, on the other; and how these systems and their underlying logics feed each other\, establishing a foundation where ubiquitous omnipresent carceral surveillance becomes normalized.   The Right to Live at Times of Digital Surveillance Ursula Rao\, University of Leipzig Across the globe\, new digital identification systems are treated as golden bullets that will solve at least two major concerns: security and transparency on the one hand\, and access to rights for citizens on the other. This ideal-type scenario is far removed from the experiences of users\, who battle with multiple access issues\, such as lack of documentation\, failure of technology\, or patchy infrastructure. By paying attention to break down and the micro-practices of trying to make a digital technology work—referring particularly to examples from the Indian universal biometric database\, Aadhaar—this paper explores the multiple evolving effects of a digital infrastructure. Patchy surveillance and uncertain inclusion create an opaque landscape of data and much confusion about what can and what cannot be seen. In a situation\, in which people can no longer rely on personal identification or documents to represent their identity\, they struggle to develop new forms of digital literacy in order to understand and influence what is and what is not known about them. As these attempts to stabilise an identity are regularly thwarted by the impossibility to penetrate the jungle of irregularly connected digital data\, people present their vulnerable bodies in front of decision makers to force them to see their suffering. Here the battle over digital data concerns\, not only what is digitally known\, but when claims backed up by digital data may be legitimately used to make a decision.   Invisible Behind Glass Walls: Pregnant\, Incarcerated People and the Violence of (non) Surveillance in Carceral States Carolyn Sufrin\, Johns Hopkins University In September\, 2019\, journalists circulated surveillance camera footage of Diana Sanchez giving birth\, alone\, in a Denver jail cell. Viewers see Sanchez writhing with painful contractions\, asking for help\, receiving a medical pad through her cell’s trapdoor glass window\, and birthing a baby. The video encapsulates an essential contradiction of the intersection of carcerality and care: to be both surveilled and invisible. In this paper\, I explore how pregnant\, incarcerated people like Diana Sanchez exist in the panoptic reality of U.S. institutions of incarceration\, while also being elided: their health care and bodily needs neglected\, and their very existence uncounted. This indifference to pregnancy behind bars– exemplified by the jail’s video surveillance system– sometimes deliberately punitive and sometimes unintentional\, encapsulates the contradictory harm of modern carcerality.   This event is part of the webinar series “Behind Walls\, Beyond Discipline: Science\, Technology & the Carceral State.” This is the final event in the series. The previous event was Privatization\, Technology\, and the Carceral State. For more information\, see the series Web site: https://sites.google.com/umich.edu/stscarceral/event-schedule URL:https://esc.umich.edu/event/living-in-a-carceral-state/ CATEGORIES:Behind Walls,Symposium END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20210528T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20210528T133000 DTSTAMP:20260615T060810 CREATED:20210414T034303Z LAST-MODIFIED:20210416T194400Z UID:2213-1622203200-1622208600@esc.umich.edu SUMMARY:Privatization\, Technology\, and the Carceral State DESCRIPTION:HOW TO PARTICIPATEThis Zoom webinar is free and open to the public. Register here. TITLEPrivatization\, Technology\, and the Carceral State SUMMARYFrom investment in surveillance technologies to relying on prison labor\, the carceral state–like so many other traditional state functions–is being privatized. The state is turning to the private sector in the hopes that it can reduce costs and corruption and produce scalable technologies for risk assessment\, monitoring\, and incarceration while generating entrepreneurial activity and even economic growth. But Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholarship teaches us that technologies are deeply shaped by and embedded in context\, and when transported carry with them particular values\, assumptions\, and imaginaries. What kinds of carceral technologies are being produced and what worlds do they imagine? How must citizens and societies remake themselves in order to fit these new technologies and privatization of the carceral state? What new economies are emerging\, and how does this shift the dynamics of power and responsibility among the state\, industry\, and the people? How might better understandings of carceral privatization advance STS understandings of the public and private sectors vis-a-vis innovation and technology?   PANELISTS Automating Vision for Prediction\, Prosecution\, and Profit Kelly Gates\, University of California San Diego According to Andrew Ng\, co-founder of Google Brain and former VP & Chief Scientist at Baidu. “A.I. is the new electricity.” We can begin to understand the implications of this declaration by considering what the media theorist Marshall McLuhan said about electricity\, namely that it is a medium without content\, and for that reason has gone unnoticed in its pervasive\, profound effects on the pace\, scale\, and pattern of human affairs. In her talk\, Prof. Gates will draw insights from the field of communication and media studies to make sense of the profound\, real and potential effects of artificial intelligence in the domains of policing and security. She will explore how the development and application of machine vision in these domains is taking shape along with its commercialization\, creating technical systems for video analytics that are deeply entangled with data monetization and the drive to build platforms and create network effects. Gates argues that we cannot understand 21st century\, real-world applications of “computer vision\,” “machine learning\,” or “artificial intelligence\,” without attention to how these technologies are being imagined and designed for policing and security applications\, by companies laser-focused on scale\, growth\, and market dominance.   Visualizing Corporate Ecologies in the Carceral State Anthony Ryan Hatch\, Wesleyan University By providing food and pharmaceutical commodities to imprisoned people\, the carceral state attempts to meet its constitutional obligations to provide for basic human sustenance\, but it cannot do this in a weak business environment. This project aims to visualize the private corporations that do business in the carceral state\, and through that visualization we draw attention to the design features of carcerality\, open possibilities for anti-capitalist and abolitionist responses to mass captivity. The prison is a specialized operating environment that is designed\, in part\, to facilitate the flow of commodities through imprisoned people\, a movement of biotechnologies that creates patterned effects on bodies and larger ecologies. Foods and pharmaceuticals reconfigure the body-minds of imprisoned people as they are forced to live in corporate ecologies as consumers within carceral space. Moreover\, the circulation of industrialized quantities of food and pharmaceuticals through prisons (and all the processes of production\, transportation\, processing\, distribution\, and waste that circulation entails) creates ecological and metabolic externalities that contribute to human suffering\, systematic environmental degradation\, and climate change. We analyze how prisons’ private structures of commodity provision within carceral institutions are linked to the raw needs for human and planetary survival.   Ecuador’s Prison Massacre: How Ultraviolent Videos of Riot Killings became Forensic Evidence Jorge Nuñez\, Kaleidos\, Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography at Universidad de las Americas (UDLA-Ecuador) In late February 2021\, an unprecedented massacre took place in three different supermax prisons in Ecuador. 79 inmates were killed during a coordinated two-day prison riot staged in the cities of Latacunga\, Cuenca\, and Guayaquil. The killings were accompanied with extreme graphic violence in the form of gory cellphone videos filmed and circulated on social media by inmates. The footage is brutal: A heart beating on the hands of a prisoner laughing\, a beheaded body lying on top of a pile of burnt corpses\, and a group killing of a stripped-naked inmate in the prison courtyard. These videos are not completely new in the Ecuadorian context. They emerged in early 2019\, when a video showing two inmates playing soccer with a decapitated head became trending topic on Twitter. At the time\, the government declared a crisis in the prison system\, deployed military troops to maximum-security penitentiaries across the country\, and replaced public servants with police personnel. This presentation follows the forensic life of ultraviolent prison videos through police units\, government institutions\, and legal courts to question how the imagery of extreme violence translates into evidence-based knowledge. I pay particular attention to how police forensics worked on the massacre autopsies to certify the videos’ authenticity\, how government lawyers tried to make the videos inadmissible in court\, and how human rights lawyers used the videos to obtain protection measures.   This event is part of the webinar series “Behind Walls\, Beyond Discipline: Science\, Technology & the Carceral State.” This is the third event in the series. The previous event is Criminal Knowledge. The next event is Living in a Carceral State. For more information\, see the series Web site: https://sites.google.com/umich.edu/stscarceral/event-schedule URL:https://esc.umich.edu/event/privatization-technology-and-the-carceral-state/ CATEGORIES:Behind Walls,Symposium END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20210521T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20210521T133000 DTSTAMP:20260615T060810 CREATED:20210414T032951Z LAST-MODIFIED:20210416T194212Z UID:2205-1621598400-1621603800@esc.umich.edu SUMMARY:Criminal Knowledge: Evidence\, Expertise\, and the Carceral State DESCRIPTION:HOW TO PARTICIPATEThis Zoom webinar is free and open to the public. Register here. TITLECriminal Knowledge: Evidence\, Expertise\, and the Carceral State SUMMARYFrom physiognomy to predictive policing\, technoscience has long been central to the power of the carceral state. At the same time\, carceral sites such as prisons\, courtrooms\, and crime scenes facilitate and even demand technoscientific interventions. Forensic and legal ideals of truth\, neutrality\, and incontrovertible evidence coexist uncomfortably with the complicated politics of technoscientific expertise. This panel seeks to extend Science and Technology Studies (STS) insights into the production and politics of expertise through engagement with research on the carceral state. It addresses questions including: How do forensic ideals of evidentiary truth and legal ideals of guilt\, innocence\, and punishment shape scientific and technical expertise and vice versa? What kinds of expertise do carceral sites make possible\, and how does carceral expertise compare across these different sites?   PANELISTS Necrological Citizenship: DNA Identification\, Social Death\, and Migrant Rights in the Mexican Borderlands Lindsay Smith\, Arizona State University Amidst the crisis of migration in the Mexican borderlands where an estimated 120\,000 migrants have disappeared\, DNA identification has been framed by both scientists and family advocates as a fundamental guarantor of the “right to know” about the identity and whereabouts of the missing. In this paper\, I examine the discourses and scientific practices linking DNA technologies with social repair\, paying particular attention to the politics surrounding the naming\, identification\, and invocation of the dead. How can we theorize the power of the dead\, their suffering revealed through forensic knowledge\, in the midst of the ongoing policies that created the conditions for their death and confinement? In this paper\, drawing on over three years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Mexican borderlands working with survivors\, family members\, and forensic scientists\, I develop the concept of necrological citizenship to better understand the ways in which the dead have emerged as a potent resource in rights claims.   The “MeToo” Kit on Trial: Contested Knowledge\, Credibility\, and Expertise with DIY Forensics Andrea Quinlan\, University of Waterloo The ‘MeToo’ Kit\, a self-administered forensic rape kit\, has been marketed as a technoscientific solution to sexual violence. However\, law enforcement agencies have been calling these kits ‘dangerous’ and challenging their legal credibility to identify sexual offenders and survivors’ lack of expertise to use them. This paper investigates the rise of self-administered forensic rape kits. It considers how the marketing and controversies around DIY rape kits are fueling carceral logics and broader techno-optimism in forensic technologies’ power to track violent offenders and prevent violent crime.   Knowledge and Freedom: An Antagonism Cristina Mejia Visperas\, University of Southern California Scholarship on scientific racism have long documented the structural continuities between captivity and knowledge production in science and medicine\, making clear how the latter become modes of institutionalized racial violence. From US slavery to the postwar prison\, this violence in the form of medical study was neither exceptional nor scandalous but normalized and sometimes even celebrated practice. In the aftermath of WWII and the Nuremberg trials\, the nation’s first bioethics taskforce sought to intervene in and regulate the widespread use of incarcerated people in medical science research. Centering principles of consent\, beneficence\, and fairness in these studies\, the taskforce’s aims to prevent abuse against “vulnerable subjects” were in sharp contrast to contemporaneous abolitionist rhetoric\, which foregrounded not the protection of such subjects from state or state-sanctioned violence\, but the armed struggle against it. My paper reads the latter as the founding gestures of an insurgent bioethical framework attuned to the logic of captivity internal to postwar medical science (and vice versa\, to the scientific rationality of captivity)\, and whose focus on direct action reveals the political limitations of (more) knowledge in the project of freedom.   This event is part of the webinar series “Behind Walls\, Beyond Discipline: Science\, Technology & the Carceral State.” This is the second event in the series. The previous event is Recasting the Technologies of Carceral Empire and the next event will be Privatization\, Technology\, and the Carceral State. For more information\, see the series Web site: https://sites.google.com/umich.edu/stscarceral/event-schedule URL:https://esc.umich.edu/event/panel-criminal-knowledge-evidence-expertise-and-the-carceral-state/ CATEGORIES:Behind Walls,Symposium END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20210514T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20210514T133000 DTSTAMP:20260615T060810 CREATED:20210414T031612Z LAST-MODIFIED:20210416T193936Z UID:2200-1620993600-1620999000@esc.umich.edu SUMMARY:Keith Breckenridge: Recasting The Technologies of the Carceral Empire DESCRIPTION:HOW TO PARTICIPATEThis Zoom webinar is free and open to the public. Register here. TITLERecasting the Technologies of the Carceral Empire: India\, South Africa\, and the Political Paradoxes of Post-Colonial Citizenship SPEAKERKeith Breckenridge\, University of the Witwatersrand in conversation with Ursula Rao\, University of Leipzig ABSTRACTIf India in the 19th century was the global laboratory for enduring Utilitarian experiments in carceral government\, South Africa played the same role – informed by the racist priorities of Atlantic Progressivism – in the 20th. The intellectual and institutional histories of these two sites of imperial government have strongly shaped each other\, and – over the last decade – they have converged on an apparently similar model of biometric citizenship. The administrative\, intellectual and political histories of the two countries are\, however\, also very different. My talk will show that these differences equip the contemporary technologies of biometric government in each region with very different political capacities and purposes. But it will also discuss the grounds for a disturbing convergence. In the very recent past both countries host similar political movements driven by potent forms of nationalism that may foster news of carceral government aimed at the identification and exclusion of long-resident populations newly defined as illegal immigrants. Addressing these crises will require – in the United States and Europe as much as in India and South Africa – new understandings\, and new technologies\, of citizenship and its entitlements. BIOProfessor Keith Breckenridge is Deputy Director of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (Wiser)\, and one of the editors of the Journal of African History. He writes about the cultural and economic history of South Africa\, particularly the gold mining industry\, the state and the development of information systems. He studied at Wits and Johns Hopkins and completed his PhD at Northwestern in 1995. Professor Ursula Rao is Director of the Department of the Anthropology of Politics and Governance at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology\, Halle (Saale).     This event is part of the webinar series “Behind Walls\, Beyond Discipline: Science\, Technology & the Carceral State.” This is the first event in this series. The next event is Criminal Knowledge. For more information\, see the series Web site: https://sites.google.com/umich.edu/stscarceral/event-schedule URL:https://esc.umich.edu/event/keith-breckenridge-recasting-the-technologies-of-the-carceral-empire/ CATEGORIES:Behind Walls,Visiting Speaker END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20210423T160000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20210423T170000 DTSTAMP:20260615T060810 CREATED:20210325T140154Z LAST-MODIFIED:20210728T154756Z UID:2189-1619193600-1619197200@esc.umich.edu SUMMARY:J. Khadijah Abdurahman: Predicting Prevention -- Algorithmic Logics in the Child Welfare System DESCRIPTION:HOW TO PARTICIPATEThis event is free and open to the public. Click here to join the event: https://umich.zoom.us/j/98631322771 This event has passed. Video of this event is available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZtUnGcTZjA TITLEPredicting Prevention: Algorithmic Logics in the Child Welfare System SPEAKERJ. Khadijah Abdurahman\, The American Assembly and Columbia University in conversation with Christian Sandvig\, University of Michigan   ABSTRACT\n\nIn response to the public outcry against the Allegheny Family Screening Tool (AFST)\, the pilot of predictive analytics in the US child welfare system to predict which child should be removed\, state child welfare agencies have justified their use of automated decision systems as a way to “allocate preventive services to at risk communities”. We will move beyond the “garbage in garbage out” analysis of historical inequities baked into the data used by predictive risk models to reflect on what type of infrastructure is built up by algorithms in human services. What kind of resistance is possible to connect the tech labor struggles of engineers tasked with developing these systems and the people on the receiving end of these predictions?\n\n\n\nBIOJ. Khadijah Abdurahman is based at We Be Imagining at Columbia University’s The American Assembly and the INCITE Center. I’m an abolitionist whose research focus is predictive analytics in the child welfare system\, the impact of social media and surveillance in Ethiopia.     URL:https://esc.umich.edu/event/j-khadijah-abdurahman/ CATEGORIES:Discussion,Visiting Speaker END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20210421T130000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20210421T140000 DTSTAMP:20260615T060810 CREATED:20210414T041607Z LAST-MODIFIED:20210414T042954Z UID:2233-1619010000-1619013600@esc.umich.edu SUMMARY:Dan Greene: The Promise of Access DESCRIPTION:TO PARTICIPATEThis Webinar is free and open to the public. Click here to register.   TITLEThe Promise of Access: Technology\, Inequality\, and the Political Economy of Hope SPEAKERDaniel Greene\, University of Maryland ABSTRACTWhy do we keep trying to solve poverty with technology? What makes us feel that we need to learn to code—or else? This common sense has ruled our economic imaginary for at least 30 years. Those who cannot log on or train up are condemned to the margins of the information economy\, and contained by the carceral state. In The Promise of Access\, Daniel Greene argues that the problem of poverty became a problem of technology in order to manage the contradictions of a changing economy. We cannot debunk or banish the idea—what Greene calls the access doctrine—that the problem of poverty can be solved with the right tools and the right skills because the idea helps those public institutions that face poverty to save themselves. Technological solutions help public institutions simplify their complex missions and win legitimacy and funding\, but at the cost of alienating the populations they serve. Blending political-economic theory with years of ethnographic fieldwork\, Greene explores how this plays out in Washington\, DC\, examining organizational change in technology startups\, public libraries\, and charter schools. Tracing the changes to the spirit and structure of these public institutions changes reveals a fight to define the good life under contemporary capitalism–and the alliances that could win that fight.   BIODaniel Greene is an Assistant Professor of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. His ethnographic\, historical\, and theoretical research explores how the future of work is built and who is included in that future. MIT Press is publishing his first book\, The Promise of Access: Technology\, Inequality\, and the Political Economy of Hope\, in 2021. His research has also appeared in such venues as Research in the Sociology of Work\, New Media & Society\, and the International Journal of Communication. Daniel lives online at dmgreene.net.   This event is co-sponsored by the Digital Studies Institute.   URL:https://esc.umich.edu/event/dan-greene-the-promise-of-access/ CATEGORIES:Visiting Speaker END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20210415T130000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20210415T140000 DTSTAMP:20260615T060810 CREATED:20210414T040241Z LAST-MODIFIED:20210414T043018Z UID:2224-1618491600-1618495200@esc.umich.edu SUMMARY:Lilly Irani: Claiming Democracy Over Digital Infrastructures DESCRIPTION:TO PARTICIPATEThis Webinar is free and open to the public. Zoom link: https://umich.zoom.us/j/91648623329\nMeeting ID: 916 4862 3329\nPasscode: misc2021   TITLEClaiming Democracy Over Digital Infrastructures SPEAKERLilly Irani\, University of California\, San Diego ABSTRACTWe work and live through layers of infrastructure designed and installed by companies and public agencies\, often out of sight and seemingly beyond our grasp. Design justice asks us to pay attention to how these infrastructure express the assumptions of the powerful and guides us to design with directly affected communities. In this talk\, I will argue that we need to go a step further to address the problem of political agency over digital infrastructures. By political agency\, I mean the capacity of agents to create effects through direct and institutional action. I will motivate and elaborate this argument with two case studies: a struggle to shape public-private smart cities infrastructure in San Diego\, as well as struggles to transform platform work conditions for Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. BIOLilly Irani is an Associate Professor of Communication & Science Studies at University of California\, San Diego. She also serves as faculty in the Design Lab\, Institute for Practical Ethics\, the program in Critical Gender Studies\, and sits on the Academic Advisory Board of AI Now (NYU). She is author of Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India (Princeton University Press\, 2019). Chasing Innovation has been awarded the 2020 International Communication Association Outstanding Book Award and the 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize for feminist anthropological research on work\, science\, or technology\, including biomedicine. Her research examines the cultural politics of high-tech work and the counter-practices they generate\, as both an ethnographer\, a designer\, and a former technology worker. She is a co-founder and maintainer of digital labor activism tool Turkopticon. Her work has appeared at ACM SIGCHI\, New Media & Society\, Science\, Technology & Human Values\, South Atlantic Quarterly\, and other venues. She sits on the Editorial Committee of Public Culture and on the Editorial Advisory Boards of New Technology\, Work\, and Employment and Design and Culture. She has a Ph.D. in Informatics from University of California\, Irvine.   This event is co-sponsored by Michigan Interactive & Social Computing (MISC).   URL:https://esc.umich.edu/event/daniel-greene-the-promise-of-access/ CATEGORIES:Visiting Speaker END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20210408T130000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20210408T140000 DTSTAMP:20260615T060810 CREATED:20210225T144017Z LAST-MODIFIED:20210325T132011Z UID:2166-1617886800-1617890400@esc.umich.edu SUMMARY:Michael Zimmer: Data Ethics During a Pandemic DESCRIPTION:How to ParticipateThis event will be held on Zoom: https://umich.zoom.us/j/91648623329\nMeeting ID: 916 4862 3329\nPasscode: misc2021 TitleData Ethics During a Pandemic SpeakerMichael Zimmer\, Marquette University AbstractCOVID-19 has generated unprecedented challenges\, but also many opportunities for the computer science\, data science\, and artificial intelligence communities to generate novel solutions for addressing the global pandemic. These range from attempts to create privacy-protecting contact tracing platforms\, to deploying tools for the effective monitoring of citizens\, remote workers\, and students\, to leveraging AI for enhanced diagnosis\, triage\, health care operations. The rapid pursuit of such computational and data-driven solutions to these urgent problems must not lose sight of their related social and ethical implications\, even during a pandemic. In this talk\, Prof. Michael Zimmer of Marquette University will highlight a multidisciplinary approach for addressing the complex technology ethics issues that computer and data science professionals face despite the urgency of the current crisis. About the SpeakerProf. Michael Zimmer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Marquette University and is affiliated faculty at the Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute. He currently serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies\, Co-Director of the interdisciplinary Data Science major\, and Director of the Data Science Graduate Certificate. Prof. Zimmer also co-directs the Social and Ethical Computing Lab at Marquette University.  With a multidisciplinary background in communication & Internet studies\, science & technology studies\, and information policy & ethics\, Prof. Zimmer researches the social and ethical dimensions of our contemporary digital ecosystem\, with particular interest in digital privacy\, data ethics\, internet research ethics\, and how users understand information flows within and across digital platforms. Recent work has focused on both quantitative and qualitative investigations into the privacy and broader ethical dimensions of big data and computational social science research\, social media platforms\, wearable fitness trackers\, intelligent personal assistants\, and the development of suicide risk prediction algorithms based on social data. This event is co-sponsored by Michigan Interactive and Social Computing. URL:https://esc.umich.edu/event/michael-zimmer/ CATEGORIES:Visiting Speaker END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20210402T140000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20210402T153000 DTSTAMP:20260615T060810 CREATED:20210325T132731Z LAST-MODIFIED:20210331T142952Z UID:2184-1617372000-1617377400@esc.umich.edu SUMMARY:Mara Mills: Overload: Telephone Operators and Digital Labor c. 1913 DESCRIPTION:HOW TO PARTICIPATEPlease click this link to join the webinar: https://umich.zoom.us/j/94844940534 Or One tap mobile: US: +13017158592\,\,94844940534# or +13126266799\,\,94844940534#\nOr Telephone:\nDial (for higher quality\, dial a number based on your current location):\nUS: +1 301 715 8592\nCanada: +1 204 272 7920\nWebinar ID: 948 4494 0534\nInternational numbers available: https://umich.zoom.us/u/acQwBhCroL TITLEOverload: Telephone Operators and Digital Labor c. 1913 SPEAKERMara Mills\, New York University ABSTRACTThis talk considers the long history of “tech work” and automation through a focus on the telephone switchboard\, to which Claude Shannon famously applied Boolean algebra for streamlining in 1938. Labor historians point to the Bell System/AT&T (the largest company and private employer in the world throughout much of the 20th century) for developments in managerial capitalism\, industrial psychology\, quality control\, and electronics that continue to influence the workplace today. Telephone operators made up more than half the Bell workforce in the early 20th century\, and labor historians suggest that operator management issues as much as technical innovation drove switchboard automation after 1913\, when the Bell System consolidated its power as a legally sanctioned monopoly. Thinking alongside Frantz Fanon’s mid-century insights about telephone operators\, madness\, and surveillance capitalism\, in this talk I highlight another 1913 shift—workers’ compensation in New York and in the Bell System—as an overlooked factor in labor management and early automation. I consider the restrictive definition of “disability” as it emerged in this moment\, especially the ways this concept was gendered and racialized. I also discuss the paradox of industrial capitalism requiring uncompensatable fatigue and occupational illness from “overload”—a new term that spanned circuits and bodies.   Photo: Hiro Ihara  BIOMara Mills is Associate Professor of Media\, Culture\, and Communication at New York University where she co-founded and co-directs the NYU Center for Disability Studies. Her book Hearing Loss and the History of Information Theory is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Mills is currently working on the history of optical character recognition and\, with Jonathan Sterne\, she is co-authoring a book titled Tuning Time: Histories of Sound and Speed. In addition to co-editing several books and journal issues (most recently\, Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality\, published by Oxford in 2020)\, she has articles in Technology & Culture\, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing\, Grey Room\, differences\, Social Text\, and PMLA\, among many other academic journals. Her writing has been translated into German\, French\, Spanish\, and Portuguese. More at maramills.org. URL:https://esc.umich.edu/event/mara-mills-operator-white-women-tech-work-and-the-origins-of-disability/ CATEGORIES:Visiting Speaker END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20210325T130000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20210325T140000 DTSTAMP:20260615T060810 CREATED:20210325T131920Z LAST-MODIFIED:20210325T131920Z UID:2176-1616677200-1616680800@esc.umich.edu SUMMARY:Jaime Snyder: Visually Encoding Personal Data for Vulnerable Populations DESCRIPTION:HOW TO PARTICIPATEZoom link: https://umich.zoom.us/j/91648623329\nMeeting ID: 916 4862 3329\nPasscode: misc2021 TITLEVisually Encoding Personal Data for Vulnerable Populations SPEAKERJaime Snyder\, University of Washington ABSTRACT“How am I doing?” Personal informatics and self-tracking systems contribute to expectations that personal health and wellness questions like this can be answered with data. Visualizations play a pivotal role in many PI systems by making tracking data available to end users. As a result\, conventions related to visually encoding are deeply implicated in explicit and implicit associations between self-knowledge and personal data. For vulnerable populations like those who self-track to manage serious mental illness (SMI)\, standardized approaches to visualizing data can introduce normative expectations and inappropriate behavioral targets. This talk will focus on a multi-phase design research project conducted in collaboration with individuals diagnosed with bipolar disorder\, a chronic SMI characterized by difficult to predict mood swings and often managed through therapeutic self-tracking. The study provides a basis for discussing the influence of affect\, visual conventions\, and vernacular literacies on the interpretation and use of personal data. Speculative design concepts created through a grounded design process introduce alternatives to representing and presenting personal data beyond standard approaches to data visualization. I will use this work to highlight key questions about the creation and use of visual representations of data that motivate the work that we do in the Visualization Studies Research Studio\, including: \nWhat characteristics of data do we making visible\, why\, and for whom? What motivates these choices and what values are reflected in these decisions?\nWhat are the mechanisms of visual encoding that surface certain things and obscure others? How are data made visible?\nAnd what are the implications of these design choices\, especially in terms of communication\, collaboration and coordination across individuals with distinctly different training\, points of reference\, and visual literacies?\nBIOJaime Snyder (http://www.jaimesnyder.com/) is an Assistant Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington in Seattle\, an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering\, and a Core Affiliate in the Data Science Studies Special Interest Group. Prior to completing a PhD in Information Science and Technology at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies\, Snyder’s training and professional practice was centered in visual art\, specifically site-specific experimental drawing and painting. She earned a BFA in Painting from Tyler School of Art and an MFA in Visual Art from Stanford University. Building on this strong foundation in the critical image-making\, her work as an information scientist has focused on the creation and use of visual representations of data\, information\, and knowledge as a means of social interaction. At the University of Washington\, she leads the Visualization Studies Research Studio where her team uses qualitative and design research methods to engage in contexts where people from very different backgrounds with diverse types of expertise use visual materials to coordinate and collaborate. Her work has appeared in top HCI and information science venues such as ACM proceedings of CHI\, CSCW\, ASSETS\, and DIS; ACM TOCHI; JASIST; Computers in Human Behavior; and Human-Computer Interaction. Snyder’s research has received recognitions from ACM SIGCHI and CSCW for contributions to diversity\, equity\, and inclusion and has been funded by UW’s Royalty Research Fund (RRF)\, Group Health Foundation\, and an NSF CAREER award\, among others.   This event is co-organized by ESC and Michigan Interactive and Social Computing (MISC). URL:https://esc.umich.edu/event/jaime-snyder-visually-encoding-personal-data-for-vulnerable-populations/ CATEGORIES:Visiting Speaker END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20210319T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20210319T133000 DTSTAMP:20260615T060810 CREATED:20210209T223508Z LAST-MODIFIED:20210312T183325Z UID:2142-1616155200-1616160600@esc.umich.edu SUMMARY:Morgan G. Ames: The Charisma Machine - The Life\, Death\, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child DESCRIPTION:To participate\, click here to register. Title\nThe Charisma Machine: The Life\, Death\, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child Abstract \nDrawing on her book\, The Charisma Machine\, Ames chronicles the life and legacy of the One Laptop per Child project and explains why — despite its failures — the same utopian visions that inspired OLPC still motivate other projects trying to use technology to “disrupt” education and development. Announced in 2005 by MIT Media Lab cofounder Nicholas Negroponte\, One Laptop per Child promised to transform the lives of children across the Global South with a small\, sturdy\, and cheap laptop computer\, powered by a hand crank. In reality\, the project fell short in many ways\, starting with the hand crank\, which never materialized. Yet the project remained charismatic to many who were enchanted by its claims of access to educational opportunities previously out of reach. Behind its promises\, OLPC\, like many technology projects that make similarly grand claims\, had a fundamentally flawed vision of who the computer was made for and what role technology should play in learning. Based on archival work and an ethnography of a model OLPC project in Paraguay\, this talk will discuss how the laptops were not only frustrating to use\, easy to break\, and hard to repair\, they were designed for “technically precocious boys” — idealized younger versions of the developers themselves — rather than the diverse range of children who actually used them. Reaching fifty years into the past and across the globe\, Ames offers a cautionary tale about the allure of technology hype and the problems that result when utopian dreams drive technology development. Speaker Bio \nMorgan G. Ames researches the ideological origins of inequality in the technology world\, with a focus on utopianism\, childhood\, and learning. Her book The Charisma Machine: The Life\, Death\, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child (MIT Press\, 2019)\, winner of the 2020 Best Information Science Book Award\, draws on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in Paraguay to explore the cultural history\, results\, and legacy of the OLPC project – and what it tells us about the many other technology projects that draw on similar utopian ideals. Morgan is an assistant adjunct professor in the School of Information at the University of California\, Berkeley\, where she teaches in Data Science and administers the Designated Emphasis in Science and Technology Studies in affiliation with the Center for Science\, Technology\, Medicine and Society. This event is co-sponsored by ESC and the Science\, Technology\, and Society (STS) Program. URL:https://esc.umich.edu/event/morgan-ames-the-charisma-machine/ END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20210226T200000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20210226T210000 DTSTAMP:20260615T060810 CREATED:20210125T191808Z LAST-MODIFIED:20210225T162508Z UID:2132-1614369600-1614373200@esc.umich.edu SUMMARY:Sophia Brueckner: Sci-Fi Prototyping and Critical Optimism DESCRIPTION:How to ParticipateThis is a scheduled video event. At the time stated above\, watch via webcast on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYn2vukv4gk. This stream will be simulcast by Detroit Public Television at dptv.org/pennystamps. Discussion is possible via comments on the Penny Stamps Speaker Series Facebook Page at https://www.facebook.com/PennyStampsSeries/. A recording of the event may be available at a later date after a delay for processing.   TitleSci-Fi Prototyping and Critical Optimism SpeakerSophia Brueckner\, University of Michigan About the SpeakerInseparable from computers since the age of two\, Sophia Brueckner believes she is a cyborg. As a software engineer at Google\, she designed and built products used by tens of millions. At the Rhode Island School of Design and the MIT Media Lab\, she researched the simultaneously empowering and controlling aspects of technology with a focus on tangible and social interfaces. Since 2011\, Brueckner has taught Sci-Fi Prototyping\, a course combining science fiction\, extrapolative thinking\, building prototypes\, and technology ethics at MIT\, Harvard\, RISD\, Brown\, and the University of Michigan. Both the class itself as well as the students’ individual projects received international recognition and were featured by The Atlantic\, Smithsonian Magazine\, Wired\, NPR\, Scientific American\, Fast Company\, and many others. Creating new ways to apply science fiction to the design process\, Brueckner prototypes alternatives to the tech industry’s limited visions for how we live with technology. She makes both physical and digital artifacts combining software programming\, digital fabrication\, and electronics with traditional media. These projects challenge the norms of the tech community\, whose work has enormous impact on our day-to-day lives\, as well as translates the problems in ways that are understandable to the everyday user. She invites others to embody an attitude of “critical optimism” and to imagine what technological futures they might prefer for themselves. Brueckner is the founder and creative director of Tomorrownaut\, a creative studio focusing on speculative futures and sci-fi-inspired prototypes. Brueckner’s work has been featured by Artforum\, SIGGRAPH\, the Peabody Essex Museum\, Portugal’s National Museum of Contemporary Art\, Leonardo\, Eyeo\, ISEA\, TEDx\, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art\, and more. She was an artist-in-residence at Autodesk Pier 9 and is now an artist-in-residence at Bell Labs Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). She is currently an assistant professor at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. Her ongoing objective is to combine her background in design and engineering with the perspective of an artist to inspire a more positive future.   This event is part of the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series. The 2020-2021 Series is brought to you with the support of our partners\, Detroit Public Television and PBS Books. URL:https://esc.umich.edu/event/sophia-brueckner-sci-fi-prototyping-and-critical-optimism/ CATEGORIES:Visiting Speaker END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20210225T090000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20210225T100000 DTSTAMP:20260615T060810 CREATED:20210122T135614Z LAST-MODIFIED:20210225T005148Z UID:2036-1614243600-1614247200@esc.umich.edu SUMMARY:Hannah Zeavin: Auto-Intimacy -- Algorithmic Therapies and Care of the Self DESCRIPTION:TO PARTICIPATEThis event will be streamed live via Zoom. This event is restricted to the University of Michigan unless special arrangements have been made. Click here for the participation credentials if you have logged into your University of Michigan GSuite account: https://sites.google.com/umich.edu/esc-center/hannah-zeavin TITLEAuto-Intimacy: Algorithmic Therapies and Care of the Self Hannah Zeavin\, University of California Berkeley   ABSTRACT“Auto-Intimacy: Algorithmic Therapies and Care of the Self” engages with therapeutic and psychiatric treatment by algorithmic automated therapies. I interrogate what therapy becomes when the traditional therapist is replaced by a computational actor. “Auto-Intimacy” opens with an overview of very early attempts to write a responsive algorithm which modeled a therapeutic relationship and addresses changes in automated therapy over the past fifty years. At the earliest moment of experimentation with automated therapies\, two strains of work emerged: the simulation and detection of a disordered mind in the hopes of automating intake\, diagnosis\, and psychological education\, and the simulation of a therapist toward the dream of automating therapeutic treatment. I will move to a brief discussion of the politics and “gamification” of contemporary psychological applications such as “Ellie” and “Joyable” and “iHelp\,” which attempt to assist persons with a wide range of mental health disorders in managing their behavior and moods. These applications\, which are frequently offered by employers to employees\, collapse the categories of wellness\, stress\, labor management\, and mental health care. SPEAKER BIOHannah Zeavin is a Lecturer in the Departments of English and History at UC Berkeley\, and is a faculty affiliate of the University of California at Berkeley Center for Science\, Technology\, Medicine\, and Society. She works as a historian and theorist with particular expertise in feminist science and technology studies. Zeavin’s first book\, The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy is forthcoming from MIT Press in August 2021. Other work has appeared in American Imago\, Logic Magazine\, The Los Angeles Review of Books\, Somatosphere\, Slate\, and beyond. Her second book\, Mother’s Little Helpers: Technology in the American Family\, investigates the ways in which technologized parenting interacts with moral\, medical\, and psychiatric concepts of parental fitness\, presence\, and absence across the 20th century and into our present\, from the baby monitor to facial recognition in schools.   URL:https://esc.umich.edu/event/hannah-zeavin-auto-intimacy-algorithmic-therapies-and-care-of-the-self/ CATEGORIES:Visiting Speaker END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20210208T160000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20210208T170000 DTSTAMP:20260615T060810 CREATED:20210121T224100Z LAST-MODIFIED:20210203T011630Z UID:2023-1612800000-1612803600@esc.umich.edu SUMMARY:Ben Green: Using Algorithms in Government DESCRIPTION:To participate\, click here to register. TITLEUsing algorithms in government: Opportunities\, challenges\, and paths forward A conversation with Ben Green ABOUT THE SPEAKERSBen Green\, assistant professor of public policy\, and Shobita Parthasarathy\, professor of public policy and director of the Science\, Technology\, and Public Policy program\, discuss the social and policy impacts of algorithms in government. Ben Green is a postdoctoral scholar and assistant professor through the Michigan Society of Fellows\, placed with at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. He is an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard and a research fellow at the AI Now Institute at NYU. Ben studies the social and policy impacts of data science\, with a focus on algorithmic fairness\, municipal governments\, and the criminal justice system. His book\, The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future\, was published in 2019 by MIT Press. Ben’s research draws on his experience working with data and technology in city government. He spent a year working for the Citywide Analytics Team in the City of Boston\, where he combined data and performance analysis to improve public services and civic engagement. Ben previously worked at the University of Chicago Data Science for Social Good Summer Fellowship\, where he developed a machine learning system to enhance the City of Memphis’ urban revitalization efforts. He also spent a year at the New Haven Department of Transportation\, Traffic\, and Parking\, where he managed the deployment of new parking meter payment technology.   This event is co-organized with the Science\, Technology\, and Public Policy Program. URL:https://esc.umich.edu/event/ben-green-using-algorithms-in-government/ CATEGORIES:Discussion END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20210206T090000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20210206T110000 DTSTAMP:20260615T060810 CREATED:20210120T201422Z LAST-MODIFIED:20210120T201534Z UID:2008-1612602000-1612609200@esc.umich.edu SUMMARY:ESC ROUTES: Covid Tech & China DESCRIPTION:After Surveillance?  After Authoritarianism? After COVID?A Chinese-English Keywords Workshop SeriesFebruary-April\, 2021\, Remote/Zoom Touted as border-crossing and irreverent of human differences such as nation and class\, the C-19 pandemic has nonetheless become a fulcrum for slicing populations into insiders versus others. While the US promulgates histrionic demonizations of communist totalitarianism\, China champions its benevolent state discipline and its citizens’ purported self-discipline (zilu) as enablers of victory over the pandemic and of a spectacularized return to normalcy. This participatory workshop series centers language incommensurabilities in Covid technologies so as to complicate binaries such as liberalism vs. authoritarianism\, science versus politics and high tech as enabler of health safety or as surveillance mechanism. Specifically\, we explore how the discrepant subjectification of populations allows one virus to be lived so differently. Mobilizing the plural meanings of “after” we subvert narratives of inevitable\, linear progression and  question what they render invisible. Unpacking keywords from both languages as windows onto respective values and sensibilities\, we query\, for instance\, what difference it makes when restrictions on movement are captured through the English “lockdown”\, which connotes stern prison control\, state mandates and active shooter protocols\, versus the Chinese “fengcheng” which evokes a more protective sealing off of a city. What in English is chronically denounced as government violations of rights and freedoms\, is lauded by some Chinese speakers as effective management (guanli) and an ethic of care (zhaogu). And while such technologies as China’s QR Health Code app are impugned by Western media as encroachments of a top-down surveillance state\, China’s national discourse relies on these digital technologies to govern through safeguarding and “positive energy” (zhengnengliang). Aggregating words from both languages that emerge from the COVID crisis\, we meander through their varied social lives and allow them to speak in official\, academic\, mass media and vernacular registers\, thereby pluralizing and destabilizing the categories they invoke. Format: Zoom workshops will take place on Feb 6\, Feb 27\, Mar 27 and Apr 17\, 2021 from 9-11 AM EST. Multidisciplinary workshop facilitators rely on active interchange and collaborative knowledge production for analyzing the social lives of keywords. Showcasing certain revealing words in their accompanying contexts we then invite attendees to contribute from their respective vantage points\, both semantic and sociological. Working knowledge of Chinese is recommended. If you are interested in participating\, please reach out to Yuchen Chen\, cycyc@umich.edu. Hosts: Louisa Schein\, Fan Yang\, Silvia Lindtner Graduate Coordinator: Yuchen Chen A collaboration between the Center for Ethics\, Society\, and Computing (ESC) at the University of Michigan (as part of the ESC ROUTES series)\, the Chinese-English Keywords Project\, and the Rutgers University Center for Chinese Studies. \n\n\n\nAbout the Chinese-English Keywords Project \nThe Chinese-English Keywords Project (CEKP) is a global and growing network of scholars interested in mapping the multivalence and conceptual gaps that emerge when key terms migrate between English and Chinese. Representing fields such as anthropology\, sociology\, literature\, politics\, geography\, media and technology studies\, participants are based in China\, the U.S.\, Europe\, Australia\, Taiwan\, and Hong Kong. Through international workshops and panels\, we create ongoing dialogue on the key concepts themselves as well as their social import. \nAs theorists of sociocultural process\, we investigate incommensurability of usages and connotations not as problems to be solved but as windows onto distinct contexts\, histories\, and social relations. We strive toward an evenhanded approach to vocabularies in both Chinese and English\, eschewing the linguistic domination that might develop as scholars in mainland import and disseminate prestigious Western terms such as “ethnography” or “decolonizing”. We attend to words in all their specificities of usage to grasp the societal impacts of Chinese and Western semantic interplay and of the discrepancies even between Chinese regions. \nWe are not linguists per se\, or philologists\, nor are we translators or etymologists. Our emphasis exceeds terminology as we are fascinated with anecdotes\, frustrations\, resolutions\, and conversations from diverse perspectives and locations. Disaggregating usages into official\, scholarly\, popular media and vernacular domains\, we take what we call the “social lives” of keywords as lenses on China and pursue vibrant accounts that reveal how power\, authority\, dissent\, even humor and parody\, proliferate meanings rather than standardize them. In the ethnographic spirit\, we are interested in observing\, listening and talking to a range of people\, including ourselves\, to collect disparate usages and portray them evocatively. Keyword entries assemble a heteroglot set of sources and vignettes to tell vibrant stories reflecting that word’s significations. Hence\, our method is to construct entries through collective participation so as to capture heterogeneity\, polysemy\, multiplicity. URL:https://esc.umich.edu/event/esc-routes-covid-tech-china/ END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20210202T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20210202T200000 DTSTAMP:20260615T060810 CREATED:20210121T152923Z LAST-MODIFIED:20210125T170657Z UID:2013-1612292400-1612296000@esc.umich.edu SUMMARY:Charlton McIlwain: Smash the Mainframe -- The Collision Between Civil Rights and Computing DESCRIPTION:How to ParticipateWatch on YouTube live during the event. Click here to sign up to receive a reminder before the event. TitleSmash the Mainframe: The Collision Between Civil Rights and Computing A Conversation with Charlton McIlwain\, Professor of Media\, Culture\, and Communication\, NYU and Christian Sandvig\, Director of ESC. Speaker BiosCharlton is Vice Provost for Faculty Engagement and Development and Professor of Media\, Culture\, and Communication at NYU. His recent work focuses on the intersections of race\, digital media\, and racial justice activism. His latest book\, Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice\, From the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter\, reveals the hidden figures — from the 1960s to the present — who fought the power and sparked a revolution in computing technology. Charlton will explore how “smashing the mainframe” became the way to articulate and demonstrate the clash between civil rights and computing in the 1960s. Moreover\, his talk will address what that moment in history can teach us about how to fight back against today’s technological threats to racial justice. Christian Sandvig is Director of the Center for Ethics\, Society\, and Computing (ESC) and H. Marshall McLuhan Collegiate Professor of Information\, Communication & Media.   This event is sponsored by the School of Information with support from the William Warner Bishop Lectureship Fund and the Martha Boaz Lectureship Fund. URL:https://esc.umich.edu/event/charlton-mcilwain-smash-the-mainframe/ CATEGORIES:Discussion,Ethics & Politics of AI,Visiting Speaker END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20210125T160000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20210125T170000 DTSTAMP:20260615T060810 CREATED:20210120T192517Z LAST-MODIFIED:20210125T193142Z UID:1988-1611590400-1611594000@esc.umich.edu SUMMARY:Timnit Gebru: Computer Vision - Who is helped and who is harmed? DESCRIPTION:To ParticipateClick to JOIN VIA ZOOM   Timnit GebruComputer Scientist\, former Co-Lead Ethical AI Research Team\, Google Brain\, Founder of Black in AI AbstractComputer vision has ceased to be a purely academic endeavor. From law enforcement\, to border control\, to employment\, healthcare diagnostics\, and assigning trust scores\, computer vision systems are being rapidly integrated into all aspects of society. In research\, there are works that purport to determine a person’s sexuality from their social network profile images\, others that claim to classify “violent individuals” from drone footage. These works were published in high impact journals\, and some were presented at workshops in top tier computer vision conferences such as CVPR. A critical public discourse surrounding the use of computer-vision based technologies has also been mounting. For example\, the use of facial recognition technologies by policing agencies has been heavily critiqued and\, in response\, companies such as Microsoft\, Amazon\, and IBM have pulled or paused their facial recognition software services. Gender Shades showed that commercial gender classification systems have high disparities in error rates by skin-type and gender\, and other works discuss the harms caused by the mere existence of automatic gender recognition systems. Recent papers have also exposed shockingly racist and sexist labels in popular computer vision datasets–resulting in the removal of some. In this talk\, I will highlight some of these issues and proposed solutions to mitigate bias\, as well as how some of the proposed fixes could exacerbate the problem rather than mitigate it. Speaker BioTimnit Gebru was a senior research scientist at Google co-leading the Ethical Artificial Intelligence research team. Her work focuses on mitigating the potential negative impacts of machine learning based systems. Timnit is also the co-founder of Black in AI\, a non profit supporting Black researchers and practitioners in artificial intelligence.  Prior to this\, she did a postdoc at Microsoft Research\, New York City in the FATE (Fairness Transparency Accountability and Ethics in AI) group\, where she studied algorithmic bias and the ethical implications underlying any data mining project. She received her Ph.D. from the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory\, studying computer vision under Fei-Fei Li. Prior to joining Fei-Fei’s lab\, she worked at Apple designing circuits and signal processing algorithms for various Apple products including the first iPad. This event is co-sponsored by the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS)\, the U-M AI Lab\, the IT Dissonance Event Series\, and ESC. URL:https://esc.umich.edu/event/timnit-gebru-computer-vision-who-is-helped-and-who-is-harmed/ CATEGORIES:Ethics & Politics of AI END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20201001T130000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20201001T150000 DTSTAMP:20260615T060810 CREATED:20201001T131406Z LAST-MODIFIED:20201001T140345Z UID:1912-1601557200-1601564400@esc.umich.edu SUMMARY:Catherine D'Ignazio: Data Feminism DESCRIPTION:FOR REMOTE PARTICIPANTSThis talk is restricted to participants at the University of Michigan. This talk will be held LIVE online via Zoom. To join\, click: https://umich.zoom.us/j/99065572384 and enter the password: misc2020 during the event time. You must use a umich.edu Zoom account to access this talk. TITLECatherine D’Ignazio: Data Feminism ABSTRACTData Feminism (co-authored with Lauren Klein\, MIT Press\, 2020) is a set of seven principles that demonstrate how feminist thinking can be operationalized in order to imagine more ethical and equitable data practices. This talk will briefly introduce those principles and relate them to a collaborative project undertaken by the Data + Feminism Lab\, Feminicidio Uruguay and the Iniciativa Latinoamericana por los Datos Abiertos. We are exploring how to build technologies to support counterdata collection by activists and civil society organizations who are working to fight gender-related violence against women and its lethal outcome\, feminicide\, in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). Photo by Diana Levine / dianalevine.com SPEAKER BIOCatherine D’Ignazio is an Assistant Professor of Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies 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. D’Ignazio is a scholar\, artist/designer and hacker mama who focuses on feminist technology\, data literacy and civic engagement. She has run reproductive justice hackathons\, designed global news recommendation systems\, created talking and tweeting water quality sculptures\, and led walking data visualizations to envision the future of sea level rise. With Rahul Bhargava\, she built the platform Databasic.io\, a suite of tools and activities to introduce newcomers to data science. Her research at the intersection of technology\, design & social justice has been published in the Journal of Peer Production\, the Journal of Community Informatics\, and the proceedings of Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM SIGCHI). Her art and design projects have won awards from the Tanne Foundation\, Turbulence.org and the Knight Foundation and exhibited at the Venice Biennial and the ICA Boston. This event is organized by the Michigan Interactive and Social Computing (MISC) and co-sponsored by ESC. URL:https://esc.umich.edu/event/catherine-dignazio-data-feminism/ END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20200417T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20200417T140000 DTSTAMP:20260615T060810 CREATED:20200111T025923Z LAST-MODIFIED:20200311T204706Z UID:1127-1587124800-1587132000@esc.umich.edu SUMMARY:CANCELLED: How to do Feminist Robotics DESCRIPTION:This event has been cancelled.\n\nWe are committed to the well-being of the members of our community. Following guidance from the University President and Chief Health Officer regarding COVID-19\, we are cancelling all ESC public events through April 21. We hope to reschedule these events at the appropriate time. We will update the community about future events–including remote participation alternatives–in due course.\n\nFor more information\, see these resources from the University administration:\n\nhttp://publicaffairs.vpcomm.umich.edu/2019-novel-coronavirus-covid-19/\n\nhttps://umich.edu/announcements/\n\n           Co-sponsored by the Institute for Research on Women and Gender and the Stamps School of Art & Design. URL:https://esc.umich.edu/event/how-to-do-feminist-robotics/ END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR