SRI Seminar Series

In this talk, Goldfarb explores how artificial intelligence (AI) presents opportunities and threats in ways that are both extraordinary and unexpected. Identifying AI’s ability to decouple prediction from other aspects of decision-making as a key to its transformative impact, Goldfarb contends that it will require the invention of new ways of operating—many of which remain undiscovered—in order to truly unleash AI’s innovative potential.

Our weekly SRI Seminar Series welcomes Jon Lindsay, an associate professor at the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy at the Georgia Institute of Technology, with a joint appointment in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and a courtesy appointment in the School of Public Policy.

In this talk, Penney will explore how rapid technological developments are leading to the automation of legal enforcement, generating serious risks for privacy and human rights. Amidst a lack of guidance for lawmakers and policymakers grappling with these issues, Penney will consider theoretical and empirical research on the social impacts of these technologies, and the shortcomings of typical solutions such as regulation and human oversight.

In this talk, Evans will present recent work on defining and measuring “truthfulness” in the context of large language models, including their calibration, and their ability to forecast world events. These topics will be considered in relation to the reduction of epistemic harms from AI and the problem of value alignment in the context of artificial general intelligence.

In this session, Raso explores how technologies that administer border and immigration policies construct another equally important, but less explored, subject: state agency. Drawing on a recent example from Canada, Raso demonstrates how digitalization simultaneously concentrates state power while diffusing agency, reflecting on what this means for legal accountability mechanisms and decision-making.

In this talk, Suresh Venkatasubramanian will dissect the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, discuss what its authors were trying to achieve, illustrate the difficult issues of technology and policy that had to be resolved, and expand on where this effort is going.

In this talk, Ariel D. Stern will explore how the rapid innovations of digital technology are changing definitions and approaches towards healthcare by practitioners, institutions, and users, and why these changes require new and innovative approaches towards policy and regulation.

Our weekly SRI Seminar Series welcomes Kobbi Nissim, the McDevitt Chair of Computer Science at Georgetown University, and an affiliate professor at Georgetown Law. Nissim’s research works towards establishing rigorous practices for privacy in computation. He is particularly interested in intersection points between privacy and various disciplines within and outside computer science, including cryptography, machine learning, game theory, complexity theory, algorithmics, statistics, databases, and more recently privacy law and policy.

In this session, David G. Rand explores the role of political polarization in the sharing and belief of misinformation, suggesting that it is possible to supplement forms of professional fact-checking by harnessing the wisdom of crowds. Presenting data from survey experiments, Rand will demonstrate that successful crowdsourcing of misinformation identification may succeed because of, rather than in spite of, polarization and political motivations.

In this session, Sven Nyholm will discuss “responsibility gaps” and asymmetries regarding praise and blame for outcomes produced by artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Using contemporary examples such as text produced by large language models, accidents caused by self-driving cars, and medical diagnoses and treatment, Nyholm will demonstrate how praise for good outcomes produced by AI is typically harder to deserve than blame for bad outcomes.

In this talk, Aaron Hertzmann will discuss how these developments parallel the development of previous artistic technologies, like oil paint, photography, and traditional computer graphics, with many useful analogies between past and current developments.

In this talk, Shion Guha will explore how predictive risk models are used in government agencies, deconstructing and interrogating what “risk” actually means in these systems and providing provocative directions for how to move beyond existing approaches.

Our weekly SRI Seminar Series welcomes Salomé Viljoen, an assistant professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School who studies the information economy, the social impacts of automation, and how legal structures can impact inequality.

Our weekly SRI Seminar Series welcomes Marzieh Fadaee, a senior research scientist at Cohere For AI, a non-profit research lab that seeks to solve complex machine learning problems and create more points of entry into machine learning research.

Our weekly SRI Seminar Series welcomes Regina Rini, an associate professor of philosophy at York University, and a Canada Research Chair in Social and Moral Cognition. Her research background is in moral psychology, ethical theory, and neuroscience.

Our weekly SRI Seminar Series welcomes Arvind Narayanan, a professor of computer science at Princeton University and the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy.

Our weekly SRI Seminar Series welcomes Arvind Narayanan, a professor of computer science at Princeton University and the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy.

Our weekly SRI Seminar Series welcomes Tawanna Dillahunt, an associate professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information whose research spans human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing fields, including environmental, economic, and social sustainability.

Our weekly SRI Seminar Series welcomes Luke Stark, an assistant professor in the Faculty of Information & Media Studies at Western University, who researches the ethical, historical, and social impacts of computational technologies.

In this talk, Pinar Yildirim will explore how automation has impacted the US labour market, demonstrating that robotization is contributing to a loss of average local labour market career values, and that these changes have repercussions for investment in public infrastructure and political affiliations.

Our weekly SRI Seminar Series welcomes Elizabeth Joh, the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis School of Law, and a leading expert on policing, privacy, and technology.

In this talk, Lynette H. Ong will examine how digital technologies have enabled new forms of control for autocratic governments to co-opt and repress dissent.

Our weekly SRI Seminar Series welcomes Dylan Hadfield-Menell, the Bonnie and Marty Tenenbaum Career Development Assistant Professor at MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and a Schmidt Futures AI2050 Early Career Fellow.

In this talk, Norman Sadeh will present his recent research exploring how to overcome privacy challenges associated with contemporary data collection practices, and will describe some practical solutions aimed at empowering people to regain control over their data.

In this talk, Jon Kleinberg proposes a revised method for online platforms to optimize user experience and he will explore new insights regarding interactions between design, behavioural science, and social media.

Our weekly SRI Seminar Series welcomes Vincent Conitzer, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. He works on artificial intelligence, including the intersections between AI and game theory, and AI and ethics.

Our weekly SRI Seminar Series welcomes Rohan Alexander for a special in-person talk that will also be broadcast online. Alexander’s research investigates how to develop workflows that improve the trustworthiness of data science.

Our weekly SRI Seminar Series welcomes Marlène Koffi, an assistant professor in economics at the University of Toronto, and a faculty affiliate at the National Bureau of Economics Research and the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society.

Our weekly SRI Seminar Series welcomes Iason Gabriel, a staff research scientist at Google DeepMind whose work focuses on the ethics of artificial intelligence, including questions about AI value alignment, distributive justice, language ethics and human rights.

Our weekly SRI Seminar Series welcomes Ann Copestake, a professor of computational linguistics at the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge. Her research involves developing computer models of human languages.

Our weekly SRI Seminar Series welcomes Luciano Floridi, founding director of the Digital Ethics Center and professor in the Cognitive Science Program at Yale University.