GVU Brown Bag Seminars

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GVU Brown Bag Seminars

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https://hdl.handle.net/1853/70896

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 83

Critical AI literacy with children: in pursuit of fair and inclusive technology futures

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2024-03-14) Sharma, Sumita

Children interact with Artificial intelligence (AI) in various direct and indirect ways, yet, there is limited research on the impacts of AI on children. Further, these studies mainly focus on cultivating, nurturing, and nudging children towards technology use and design, without promoting critical perspectives towards AI. For intance, there is little discussion with children on the limitations, inherent biases, and lack of diversity in current design and development of AI, and on critical examination of the ethical aspects of technology use, design, inherent limitations, and consequences of these on children and society at large. In this talk, I will present my work on critical AI literacy with young children, sharing lessons from hands-on workshops with children in Finland, India, and Japan.
Foley Scholar Winner and Finalists Presentations Spring 2024

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2024-03-07) Bhat, Karthik Seetharama ; Narechania, Arpit ; Pendse, Sachin ; Riggs, Alexandra Teixeira

Foley Scholar Award Winner: Envisioning Technology-Mediated Futures of Care Work, Karthik Seetharama Bhat. Caregiving is a universal activity that is receiving increasing attention among technologists and researchers in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Emerging technologies like conversational AI, augmented and virtual reality, and smart homes have all been described as potentially revolutionary technologies in care work, intended to automate and transform the overall care experience for caregivers and care recipients. However, such promises have yet to translate to successful deployments as these technological innovations come up against socioculturally situated traditions of care work that prioritize human connection and interaction. In this talk, I will share empirical studies looking into how formal care workers (in clinical settings) and informal care workers (in home settings) reconcile technology utilization in care work with sociocultural expectations and norms that dissuade them. I will then discuss possible technology-mediated futures of care work by positing how emerging technologies could best be designed for and integrated into activities of care in ways that unburden care workers while ensuring quality care.
Exploring Dual Perspectives in Computer-mediated Empathy

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2024-02-29) Lee, Sang Won

A common belief is that technology can play a pivotal role in enhancing individuals' capacity to empathize with others. While it is true, it's worthwhile to adopt an alternative perspective that underscores the inherent duality of empathy and emphasizes the empowering aspect for the recipients of empathy. In this talk, I will focus on recent projects that explore how technologies can facilitate empathy. These approaches primarily focus on those who need to be empathized and help them express, reveal, and reflect on themselves. Through these works, I propose a new framework that offers various research topics relevant to enhancing computer-mediated empathy.
An Introduction to Healthcare AI

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2024-02-22) Braunstein, Mark

Healthcare and AI have an intertwined history dating back at least to the 1960's when the first 'cognitive chatbot' acting as a psychotherapist was introduced at MIT. Today, of course, there is enormous interest in and excitement about the potential roles of the latest AI technologies in patient care. There is a parallel concern about the risks. Will human physicians be replaced by intelligent agents? How might such agents benefit patient care short of that? What role will they play for patients. We'll explore this in a far-ranging talk that includes a number of real-world examples of how AI technologies are already being deployed to hopefully benefit those physicians and their patients.
Whose Responsibility? The Case for Responsible Data Practice

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2024-02-15) Wang, Ding

Diversity in datasets is a key component to building responsible AI/ML. Despite this recognition, we know little about the diversity among the annotators involved in data production. Additionally, despite being an indispensable part of AI, data annotation work is often cast as simple, standardized and even low-skilled work. In this talk, I present a series of studies that aim at unpacking the data annotation process with an emphasis on the data worker who lifts the weight of data production. This includes interview studies to uncover both the data annotator’s perspective of their work and the data requestor’s approach to the diversity and subjectivity the workers bring; an ethnographic investigation in data centers to study the work practices around data annotation; a mixed methods study to explore the impact of worker demographic diversity on the data they annotate. While practitioners described nuanced understandings of annotator diversity, they rarely designed dataset production to account for diversity in the annotation process. This calls for more attention to a pervasive logic of representationalist thinking and counting that is intricately woven into the day to day work practices of annotation. In examining structure in which the annotation is done and the diversity is seen, this talk aims to recover annotation and diversity from its reductive framing and seek alternative approaches to knowing and doing annotation.
Trans Technologies

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2024-01-25) Haimson, Oliver

Haimson's forthcoming book Trans Technologies (MIT Press, 2025) examines the world of trans technologies: apps, health resources, games, art, AR/VR, and other types of technology designed to help address some of the challenges transgender people face in the world. His research team conducted in-depth interviews with more than 100 creators of existing trans technologies to understand the current landscape, highlight areas for future innovation, and build theory via community input around what it means for a technology to be a trans technology. This work illuminates the people who create trans technologies, the design processes that brought these technologies to life, and the ways trans people often rely on community and their own technological skills to meet their most basic needs and challenges. He discusses how trans technology design processes are often deeply personal, and focus on the technology creator’s own needs and desires. Thus, trans technology design can be empowering because technology creators have agency to create tools they need to navigate the world. However, in some cases when trans communities are not involved in design processes, this can lead to overly individualistic design that speaks primarily to more privileged trans people’s needs. Further, he discusses some of his research group’s ongoing participatory design work designing trans technologies.
Emotion AI in the Future of Work

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2024-01-18) Andalibi, Nazanin

Emotion AI, increasingly used in mundane (e.g., entertainment) to high-stakes (e.g., education, healthcare, workplace) contexts, refers to technologies that claim to algorithmically recognize, detect, predict, and infer emotions, emotional states, moods, and even mental health status using a wide range of input data. While emotion AI is critiqued for its validity, bias, and surveillance concerns, it continues to be patented, developed, and used without public debate, resistance, or regulation. In this talk, I highlight some of my research group's work focusing on the workplace to discuss: 1) how emotion AI technologies are conceived of by their inventors and what values are embedded in their design, and 2) the perspectives of the humans who produce the data that make emotion AI possible, and whose experiences are shaped by these technologies: data subjects. I argue that emotion AI is not just technical, it is sociotechnical, political, and enacts/shifts power – it can contribute to marginalization and harm despite claimed benefits. I advocate that we (and regulators) need to shift how technological inventions are evaluated.
Three Lessons Towards Ethical Tech

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2024-01-11) Fiesler, Casey

Hardly a day passes without a new technology ethics scandal in the news — from privacy violations on social media to biased algorithms to controversial data collection practices. In computing practice and research, good intentions sometimes still lead to negative consequences. So what can we do as technologists, researchers, and educators? This talk describes three lessons from my research that inform ethical practices in studying, building, and teaching about technology: (1) remembering the humans present in data, towards ethical research practices; (2) unpacking ethical debt (as a parallel to technical debt) in technology design and research as the precursor to the types of unintended consequences that underly many controversies; and (3) a broader perspective on computing education that puts thoughtful critique of technology in everyone’s hands.
Augment, Diminish, Remap Reality: Freeing the Mind and its Resources

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-11-30) McLaughlin, Anne

Our senses and minds construct our reality. Both are inherently limited and we naturally seek tools to improve our experiences. Anyone who covers their ears as a siren roars past, turns on closed captions, or dons sunglasses on a bright day has altered ‘reality.’ As technology advances, we can also control reality with cutting-edge extended reality (XR) technologies, which add to, subtract from, and remap sounds and visuals in our world. This presentation will cover the perceptual and mental processes underlying XR cognition aids, with methods of testing the effectiveness of these aids, current domains of inquiry, and results from several laboratory experiments on how altering visual and auditory reality can improve a person’s performance and experience.
Investigating Transdisciplinary Approaches for Community-engagement

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-11-16) Hamidi, Foad

Participatory design (PD) offers powerful and inclusive principles and methods for enabling mutual learning among diverse stakeholders and interested parties. As our society’s aspirations for computational systems and processes that respond to multifaceted needs and desires continue to grow, so does the need to investigate approaches that transcend disciplinarity to achieve broad societal goals. One such goal is to develop the public's capacity to engage creatively and critically with emerging technologies of interest. In this talk, I draw on several recent projects where I use community-based PD to investigate and interrogate emerging technologies, such as DIY assistive technologies and living media interfaces (LMIs), together with stakeholders. I describe how we develop and use prototypes, design activities, and art installations in these projects to generate conversation about technological and social possibilities, limitations, and implications.