Theme for 2021:
Imaginations of Public AI
Abstract :
Centre for Policy Studies runs an annual AI and policy seminar to bring AI and policy academics together to very concretely discuss the deeply political aspects of AI, to explore how mechanisms of data extraction and refining, model research, design, and deployment, all processes which have economic value and impact may be intervened with policymaking in order to prevent inequity and harm in societies where these technologies are made and used.
We live in a society where the horror of the pandemic has enabled to a large extent a larger control on work processes by the private industry and further erosion of labour norms and rights, and in this erosion the role of technology and especially AI has been amplified in making possible remote work at scale, remote surveillance of employees, remote teaching, new telemedicine techniques etc. Over the year the number of office surveillance mechanisms have increased not just in the lab but also the market. . We also are observing the increasing pushing of AI techniques in the public sphere, like judicial AI, AI in smart cities, with the pandemic being a suitable reason given for aggressive data collection and algorithmic governance.
With this in mind this annual seminar series builds a space for a continuous discussion over time between computer science and policy academics, researchers, policymakers, scientists and social scientists of all hues, and students to collaboratively identify and discuss these issues.
About the Speakers:
Bidisha Chaudhuri is an Associate Professor in the domain of IT and Society at IIIT Bangalore. She received her PhD from South Asia Institute at Heidelberg University, Germany. Her current research projects include, information systems for sustainable development, politics of data and algorithms, political economy of digital identity and sociology of work and automation.
Preethi Jyothi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay. Her research interests are broadly in machine learning applied to speech and language, focusing on low-resource settings and Indian languages. She was a Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2013 to 2016. She received her Ph.D. in computer science from The Ohio State University. Her Ph.D. thesis dealt with statistical learning methods for pronunciation models. Her work on this topic received a Best Student Paper Award at Interspeech, 2012. She was awarded a Google Faculty Research Award in 2017 for her proposal on accented speech recognition. She serves on the ISCA SIGML board and is a member of the Editorial Board of Computer Speech and Language, a prominent journal in speech and language processing.
Suha Mohamed has an experience working in the startup ecosystem with several tech startups, social enterprises (Microsoft for Startups) and women-led organisations (SonderConnect). At Microsoft, she led a program that supported social enterprises in leveraging technology to amplify their impact. Previously she worked for the Centre for Law and Policy Research, where she focused on issues concerning gender, public health & disability rights. At Aapti Institute, a public research institution, Suha leads partnerships and strategy. Her research focuses on the nexus of artificial intelligence, data rights and labour – where she is interested in the possibilities of stewardship in activating collective negotiation and bargaining in the data economy.
Anupam Guha is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Policy Studies at IIT Bombay who primarily works on AI, AI policy, AI and labour. He has a PhD, batch of ’17, in computer science from the University of Maryland where he worked on multimodal language and vision AI systems. He has also worked in the industry as an AI researcher from 2017 to 2019 on NLP systems. His current work in AI policy is informed by a technical understanding of AI and its relationship with labour and capital. He works to expand the critical lens on AI from the current instrumental and normative frameworks to one informed by an immanent critique of the political economy of techno-social systems.