This panel will tackle the ambitious challenge of examining the intersection of emerging artificial intelligence (AI) technology and the production of news media in an online environment.

Notes

The assembled panellists represent a diverse range of perspectives, from industry to academia, and an array of professional backgrounds. The speakers on this panel will address critical questions about how tools for automation and AI impact the production of news media, how an increasing reliance on technology has affected the battle against misinformation, and how COVID-19 and shifts to alternative work arrangements has impacted news media production in this context. Panellists will also examine the specific technologies that are changing the production of news today, delving into the technical challenges facing modern newsrooms.

Notes

This talk presents new research in cyber security and privacy, offering a broad approach by which computer science can contribute systems that are better integrated with society’s public policy priorities. Our new approach to cyber security will provide previously unattainable cyber risk pricing metrics to guide private investment decisions, make cyber insurance markets more efficient, and shape cyber security regulations that are more effective. To address privacy needs, we propose changes to the underlying architecture of relational database systems to enable auditable conformance with state-of-the-art privacy values in laws such as the European Union General Data Protection Directive (GDPR). Taken together, this work suggests we can improve computing governance with new extensions of two key concepts in the theory of computation. First, we describe policy soundness: the property of a computing system that shows it is logically sound with respect to a given legal ruleset. Second, technical completeness: the property of a law or regulation which shows the rules are logically complete with respect to the dynamics of a given computing system. Building these kinds of abstractions into systems and laws can make computing systems more governable and thus more trustworthy.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has been met by unequal responses in different countries and led to unequal impacts to Europe, USA, Asia, and Latin America. The pandemic has made unequal internet access both within and between countries. At the same time, new opportunities also emerge and the Web changes dramatically. The purpose of this panel is to discuss the future of the Web in a post-COVID world.

– What is the current situation of the Web compared to the situation before 2020?
– What has shifted in the web area and have we reached the “new normal?”
– What data security implications on the Web should we be concerned about?

Abstract

As the pandemic keeps influencing our everyday lives, researchers assemble valuable datasets that can help to better understand the impact COVID-19 has on society. This includes both data from the Web or other digital platforms, as well as data about Web usage and information flows. And while the current focus is naturally on understanding the immediate effects of the pandemic to improve the situation as it unfolds, we also encourage thinking about its impact on the future and asking how to remember and pass on the lessons learned. The panel features experts from different research fields to contribute their unique data and perspectives. Together we are aiming to address topics such as mobility and (dis)information, and to shed light on different national perspectives on COVID-19 responses.

Notes

In 2016, an MIT Graduate student gave a TEDx Talk in New York.  Joy Buolamwini’s  How I am fighting Algorithmic Bias, has been viewed by nearly 1.5 million people, and it later led to a journey of deeper discovery with other researchers and filmmaker Shalini Kantayya. Their resulting film, Coded Bias, was launched at the Sundance Festival in 2020 and later released on Netflix in April 2021. The film reveals in an accessible way how facial recognition software and automated decision-making has unprecedented power to reproduce bias at scale. As companies and governments increasingly outsource their services to entities which employ more machines and more machine learning , we can now see that algorithms are being used to decide what information we see, who gets hired, who gets health care, and who gets undue police scrutiny. Human rights lawyers and ethicists can see that this affects vulnerable communities the hardest.

Our distinguished panellists will bring Joy’s insights right up to date and will chart how fast the field is moving whilst also digging deep into the origins of this field. What steps can and should be taken by companies, individual people and researchers to change the way in which ordinary human bias and ignorance is encoded into our digitally driven world? How will we help enable machines not to make the same mistakes as we have historically made? Do we understand the concept of ethics in private and public companies well enough, let alone AI ethics? Do private companies have the same responsibilities as public and government institutions when it comes to transparency and accountability? Environmental, Social and Governance (ESGs) are all the rage but are they becoming a branch of marketing?