Envisioning Paths: Individual and Collective Action for Ethical Technology Development
Envisioning Paths: Individual and Collective Action for Ethical Technology Development
Date & Time: Friday, December 2nd 3-4:30PM
Location: CEMEX Auditorium or virtual attendance option. If you choose to attend the event virtually, you will be contacted and provided with the link to do so. Open to the public.
Description: What can we do today to shape the technology of tomorrow? How can we decide among the different roles we can play in the development of technology – including choosing not to participate? Join us to hear about our different journeys within the sphere of ethics and technology, the choices we’ve made, what we think others can learn from our experiences, how we’re thinking through the factors at play today, the different actions that should (and should not) be taken, and strategies for effectively shaping how society and technology intertwine in the future. Information on the speakers for this event is provided below.
Speaker Bios:
Professor Emily M. Bender is a Professor of Linguistics and an Adjunct Professor in the School of Computer Science and the Information School at the University of Washington, where she has been on the faculty since 2003. She holds an AB in Linguistics from UC Berkeley (1995) and a PhD in Linguistics from Stanford (2001). Her research interests include multilingual grammar engineering, computational semantics, and the societal impacts of language technology. Among her many books and publications, she is co-authored the most widely cited and taught research in algorithmic ethics: On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜 [dl.acm.org] (FAcct 2021). In her public scholarship, she brings linguistic insights to lay audiences to cut through the hype about "AI" and facilitate understanding of the actual functionality of the systems being sold under that name.
Dr. Margaret “Meg” Mitchell is a researcher of machine learning and ethics-informed AI development in tech. She has published over 50 papers on natural language generation, assistive technology, computer vision, and AI ethics, and holds multiple patents in the areas of conversation generation and sentiment classification. She currently works at Hugging Face as Chief Ethics Scientist, driving forward work in the ML development ecosystem, ML data governance, AI evaluation, and AI ethics. She previously worked at Google AI as a Staff Research Scientist, where she founded and co-led Google's Ethical AI group. Together with Professor Emily M. Bender, Dr. Timnit Gebru, and Angelina McMillan-Major, she co-authored “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜.”
Presented by VPUE ESF in co-sponsorship with Stanford's Program in Science, Technology and Society (STS), The McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), and the Department of Computer Science.