AFOG hosts various public events including talks, panels, and workshops, to learn about and discuss relevant topics.
Arati Prabhakar
Today, the eight-decade-long federal commitment to science and technology is wobbling dangerously. Yet America’s challenges and ambitions are still as great as they have ever been: improving health, meeting the climate crisis, using AI to build the future we want, and more. This presentation will discuss problematic myths and misunderstandings about science and technology and will explore what it takes to change outcomes and achieve our great aspirations.
Registration required. Registration deadline: April 1, 2025
This lecture will be preceded by a morning discussion with AFOG at 9:00 am.
Sponsored by:
Arati Prabhakar
Join us for a conversation with Dr. Arati Prabhakar. Dr. Prabhakar was President Biden’s science and technology advisor and led the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in 2022–25. She is currently a School of Information and Goldman School of Public Policy Executive Fellow in Applied Technology Policy. Her four decades of professional contributions span the public and private sectors. She has led DARPA and NIST, been a partner at an early-stage VC firm and a senior corporate executive, and started an innovation nonprofit.
This discussion will take place the morning of Dr. Prabhakar's 4 pm Fellowship lecture, "The Stakes Are High: Science & Technology for Our Future."
Dr. Prabhakar will speak with AFOG about her plans for the Executive Fellowship this year regarding on the future of AI:
What is your greatest hope for what we accomplish with AI?
Much of today’s talk is about business productivity. That has to be done right, in ways that protect civil rights and civil liberties, respect and boost workers and creators, and manage safety and security. And if it is done right, productivity can be a boon.
But our dreams for AI reach much further. We want to use AI to create better drugs faster, close educational gaps for our kids, craft better weather forecasts, transform public service delivery, design more sustainable materials, decarbonize our economy, and much more.
Fully realizing these hoped-for benefits will take much more than simply training a model or starting a company. Some of these big ambitions require working out issues of data access, IP, and compensation for training data. Many require deep technical research to develop advanced AI capabilities. All of them require validating AI systems and rigorously testing them in real-world settings. And each powerful application will come with new risks that need to be managed and mitigated: sometimes physical safety risks, often risks of bias in data and discrimination in use, often risks to privacy, and almost always employment impacts.
Join us for a discussion of big visions for AI that can change people’s lives, and what it will take to realize these dreams.
Michele Elam
Faculty Associate Director, Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered AI
William Robertson Coe Professor of Humanities, Stanford English Departmentr
Elam’s research in interdisciplinary humanities connects literature and the social sciences in order to examine changing cultural interpretations of gender and race. Her work is informed by the understanding that racial perception in particular impacts outcomes for health, wealth and social justice. More recently, her scholarship examines intersections of race, technology and the arts. “Making Race in the Age of AI,” her most recent book project, considers how the humanities and arts function as key crucibles through which to frame and address urgent social questions about equity in emergent technologies.
Co-sponsored by:
Şerife Wong
Artist, Icarus Salon
Affiliate, O'Neil Risk Consulting and Algorithmic Auditing
Affiliate Research Scientist, Kidd Lab, UC Berkeley
The hype around generative AI has provoked both anxiety and enthusiasm. Artists and other creators are engaged in contentious debate on topics such as copyright, authorship, and the theft of labor. While artists argue if we should or shouldn’t use these tools, other important questions need our attention. What is the power of art? How can this power be affected by AI tools? How is creativity instrumentalized to centralize power? This performance lecture will take a nuanced look behind the dominant narratives of generative AI to critically examine what interests artists and their art serve
Şerife (Sherry) Wong is a Turkish-Hawaiian artist working on AI governance. She leads Icarus Salon, an organization that explores politics, culture, and technology through art. Her advocacy work for justice in AI and more active roles for artists in policymaking has been recognized through several awards: a residency fellowship at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, a research fellowship at the Berggruen Institute, a Mozilla Creative Award, a residency at the Media Enterprise Design Lab, and she was listed as one of 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics. She serves on the board of directors for Digital Peace Now and is the culture and AI governance lead at the Tech Diplomacy Network. Şerife frequently collaborates with the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University to bridge conceptual art with the social sciences.
As a leader in art and technology, she has served on award committees for Ars Electronica, Burning Man, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Previously, Şerife has had solo art exhibits in New York (I-20 Gallery), San Francisco, Vienna, and Mexico City; and exhibited internationally at venues such as Art Basel Miami, Shanghai Art Fair, FIAC Paris, ARCO Madrid, and Art Cologne. Her work uses research and activism as mediums of art to create performances, social sculptures, paintings, videos, happenings, and interactive web-based work. She is currently working on Artificial Life Coach, a comedic performance art piece that uses social media to educate the public on AI.
Co-sponsored by:
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Lydia Gaby, Principal, HR&A Advisors; Krishnaram Kenthapadi, Chief AI Officer & Chief Scientist, Fiddler AI; Jared Lewis, Head of Policy, Dentsu Good
Join the UC Berkeley Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Group (AFOG), The Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC), and the CITRIS Policy Lab for the virtual event, Sustainable AI: Ethical Applications for Good on October 19th, 11am-12pm PST.
Trustworthy AI and AI observability have become crucial requirements with the increasing development, deployment, and wide-spread adoption of both predictive AI and generative AI models and applications. This presentation explores current initiatives in AI governance and expands on Trustworthy AI and AI observability to explore topics of AI for sustainability. Join Lydia Gaby, Principal at HR&A Advisors, Krishnaram Kenthapadi, Chief AI Officer for Fiddler AI, and Jared Lewis, Head of Policy for Dentsu Good as they present on Sustainable AI, an innovative way to unlock the potential of Artificial Intelligence.
Meet the Speakers
Lydia Gaby, a Principal at HR&A Advisors, is a leading expert in equitable economic development. Her expertise lies in creating strategies that foster wealth creation while addressing racial and climate disparities. Lydia offers profound insights into the impact of technologies, policies, and investments on communities and their economies. She is known for her expertise in crafting ethical corporate and government strategies grounded in community priorities and supported by community-validated data. Lydia's extensive experience uniquely positions her to collaborate with communities, empowering them to advocate for and lead transformative change that enhances lives.
Krishnaram Kenthapadi is the Chief AI Officer & Chief Scientist of Fiddler AI, an enterprise startup building a responsible AI and ML monitoring platform. Previously, he was a Principal Scientist at Amazon AWS AI, where he led the fairness, explainability, privacy, and model understanding initiatives in the Amazon AI platform. Prior to joining Amazon, he led similar efforts at the LinkedIn AI team, and served as LinkedIn’s representative in Microsoft’s AI and Ethics in Engineering and Research (AETHER) Advisory Board.
Previously, he was a Researcher at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Lab. Krishnaram received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2006. He serves regularly on the senior program committees of FAccT, KDD, WWW, WSDM, and related conferences, and co-chaired the 2014 ACM Symposium on Computing for Development. His work has been recognized through awards at NAACL, WWW, SODA, CIKM, ICML AutoML workshop, and Microsoft’s AI/ML conference (MLADS). He has published 50+ papers, with 7000+ citations and filed 150+ patents (70 granted). He has presented tutorials on privacy, fairness, explainable AI, model monitoring, responsible AI, and generative AI at forums such as ICML, KDD, WSDM, WWW, FAccT, and AAAI, given several invited industry talks, and instructed a course on responsible AI at Stanford.
Jared Lewis is a public policy entrepreneur, specializing in digital access and sustainable economies. He currently serves as Head of Policy for Dentsu Good, a Sustainability Accelerator, where he is helping to shape digital first, circular economy projects in partnership with some of the world’s largest corporations.
Jared worked as a Director with HR&A, a leading public interest consulting practice where he helped develop the National Broadband Resource Hub, an integrated platform supporting Federal, State and Municipal governments as well as leading Community Based Organizations in expanding Broadband adoption programs in preparation for the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
Previously, Jared worked as a Global Program Manager for Airbnb where he led a global user education and mobilization program in nine countries including: US, Japan, Australia, Brazil, South Africa, UK, Japan, Germany and Ireland. His work helped to re-establish the organization’s user engagement model that has served as the reconstitution of the Policy/ Comms mobilization activities from political advocacy to community engagement and local community development.
Jared was the inaugural Congressman John Lewis Social Justice Fellow for Science and Technology where he worked for two members of Congress on a range of technology initiatives. Jared is a current Tech Fellow at the Berkeley Citris Lab where he has been developing an initiative around AI for Good.
Jared holds a Masters of Public Policy from the University of Chicago and is currently a J.D. Student at Fordham University School of Law.
Tara Kola
Senior Experience Researcher, Adobe Education
Founder & Director, Camp Kahani Creative Camp for South Asian girls
Tara Kola is a Senior Experience Researcher on the Adobe Design Research & Strategy team, leading research for Education. She specializes in conducting ethnographic and mixed methods research on child and adolescent creative activities, entertainment consumption, and narrative practices, inside and outside of classrooms. She supports content, design, and product teams in making research-driven decisions. Tara has experience conducting research and fieldwork across the US, India, and China. She is passionate about creative education, representation in media/entertainment, and building inclusive communities. She has a research background in anthropology and history. Outside of research, Tara runs a storytelling summer camp/afterschool program for South Asian youth called Camp Kahani.
Co-sponsored by:
Dr. Julie Shackford-Bradley
This fourth and final session of the Series on Justice and Content Governance will be a hands-on workshop focusing on restorative justice.
David Robinson
AFOG is co-sponsoring this Social Science Matrix talk, an “Authors Meet Critics” panel about the book Voices in the Code: A Story About People, Their Values, and the Algorithm They Made, by David Robinson, a visiting scholar at Social Science Matrix and a member of the faculty at Apple University. Robinson will be joined in conversation by Iason Gabriel, a Staff Research Scientist at DeepMind, and Deirdre Mulligan, Professor in the UC Berkeley School of Information.
Nick Seaver, Julie Cohen
This third panel in AFOG’s Justice and Content Governance Panel Series will explore how infrastructures, assemblages, and ecosystems spread and contribute to harm and how justice can work in complex, interconnected systems.
Amy Hasinoff
This second panel in AFOG’s Justice and Content Governance Panel Series focuses on how conceptions of justice, especially restorative justice, can drive the structures and practices of content governance.
Anna Lauren Hoffman, Hadar Dancig-Rosenberg
AFOG’s Justice and Content Governance Panel Series opens with a panel focusing on the problems, potentials, and pitfalls of emphasizing justice in content governance systems. The panel will feature Professors Anna Lauren Hoffman and Hadar Dancig-Rosenberg.
Hadar Dancig-Rosenberg: ‘Post-trauma and Post: How Do Sexual Assault Survivors Perceive the Potential Capacity of Facebook vis-à-vis the Criminal Justice System to Address Their Needs?’
This study is part of a large empirical project about the role of social media as a mechanism for seeking informal justice for sexual assault survivors. Based on 499 responses to an online survey and on 20 in-depth interviews with sexual assault survivors who shared their stories of victimization on Facebook (interviews were conducted with the same interviewees in two waves—before and after the #MeToo), the study explores how sexual assault survivors perceive the potential capacity of Facebook to address their needs, compared to the potential capacity of the criminal justice system. Findings reveal the greater over-all appreciation that survivors have for social media compare to their appreciation for the criminal justice system, thus demonstrate the power of informal justice, but at the same time they also shed light on the limitations of social media to address some of the victims’ needs and on the risks involved in turning to social media to seek alternative justice.
Various speakers
The 2022 Symposium on Surveillance and Education, held via Zoom on April 15, explores the roles of surveillance and policing in the classroom, on campus, and in the community. The symposium considers how layers of surveillance and policing affect relationships among students, faculty, staff, administrators, and other citizens. Featured speakers include community activists, faculty members, university administrators, and students. Sessions will run from 10am until 2pm Pacific.
André Brock, Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Georgia Tech
David Robinson
Event is postponed until a later date TBD.
David Robinson, Visiting Scholar at the UC Berkeley Social Science Matrix
Event is postponed until a later date TBD.
Daniel Greene, Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies
Daniel Greene, Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies
Latanya Sweeney, Professor of the Practice of Government and Technology at the Harvard Kennedy School and in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Colin Bennett, Professor, Political Science, University of Victoria BC, Simone Browne, Associate Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and Research Director of Critical Surveillance Inquiry (CSI) with Good Systems, a research collaborative at the University of Texas at Austin; Sarah Igo, Andrew Jackson Chair in American History, Professor of Law, Professor of Political Science, Professor of Sociology, Director, American Studies Program, Vanderbilt; and Priscilla Regan, Professor in Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.
In the second part of the two-part roundtable, we will put the current moment into historical context to understand how and why we see a recent upswell of resistance to facial recognition and surveillance technology: What has changed? Why does it matter? Where should we go from here?
Tawana Petty, mother, social justice organizer, youth advocate, poet and author. She is intricately involved in water rights advocacy, data and digital privacy rights education and racial justice and equity work. She is the National Organizing Director at Data for Black Lives, former director of the Data Justice Program at Detroit Community Technology Project, co-founder of Our Data Bodies, a convening member of the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition, a Digital Civil Society Lab fellow at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, and director of Petty Propolis, a Black woman led artist incubator primarily focused on cultivating visionary resistance through poetry, literacy and literary workshops, anti-racism facilitation, and social justice initiatives
Sarah Hamid, The Policing Tech Campaign lead at the Carceral Tech Resistance; Mutale Nkonde, founding CEO of AI For the People and researcher, policy advisor and key constituent to the 3C UN Roundtable on AI; Nicole Ozer, Technology & Civil Liberties Director, ACLU of California; Tawana Petty, National Organizing Director at Data for Black Lives, former Data Justice Program Director at Detroit Community Technology Project, co-founder
In this two-part roundtable, we will build on discussions started at the Refusal Conference last summer where we dug into the idea of rejecting or refusing technology which so often runs against the grain of the celebrated role technology has generally occupied in the West (Marx 1997), wedded closely to the notion of progress itself. The roundtable discussions will specifically focus on the recent refusals and resistance to facial recognition technologies as part of an effort to understand them, draw lessons from them, and put this moment in conversation and context. In this first panel we will explore this up swell of resistance to facial recognition to understand what is happening in the current moment
Evgeny Morozov, Author, "The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom"
(co-sponsored with the Social Science Matrix)
Registration required
Ethan Zuckerman, Associate Professor of Public Policy, Communication and Information at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (Event part of the PIT-UN Public Lecture Series)
A virtual conference intended to 'meet the moment' by exploring organized technology refusal from historical and contemporary vantage points.
Madeleine Clare Elish, Research Lead and co-founder of the AI on the Ground Initiative at Data & Society
Lucy Suchman, Professor of the Anthropology of Science and Technology at Lancaster University
(co-sponsored with CSTMS)
Panel discussion with: Henriette Cramer (Principal Research Scientists, Spotify), Josh Lovejoy (Principal Design Manager, Microsoft), Dan Perkel (Director, IDEO), & Emily Witt (UX Researcher, Salesforce)
Kate Starbird, Associate Professor, Department of Human-Centered Design & Engineering, University of Washington
Desmond Patton, Associate Professor of Social Work, Columbia University
Ruha Benjamin, Associate Professor of African American Studies, Princeton University
Michelle R. Carney, User Experience Researcher, Machine Learning + AI, Google
Mary Gray, Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research New England in conversation with Prayag Narula, President and co-founder of LeadGenius and MIMS alum (2012)
Eric Horvitz, Technical Fellow and Director, Microsoft Research.
Hoyt Long, Associate Professor of Japanese Literature, University of Chicago
Virginia Eubanks, University of Albany, SUNY
Issa Kohler-Hausmann, Yale University
by invitation only
Christian Sandvig, University of Michigan
(co-sponsored with CSTMS)
Jon Kleinberg, Cornell University
Angèle Christin, Stanford University
(co-sponsored with CSTMS)
Karen Levy, Cornell University
(co-sponsored with the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology)
Dawn Nafus, Intel Corporation
Rich Caruana, Microsoft Research