Visual Culture Program Event
AI is supposedly everywhere and is always just about to be replacing everything. While we are surrounded by hype, some of the most important things that we lack right now, in relation to AI, are powerful and captivating imaginaries about how life with technology could be different. In this talk, D'Ignazio will survey some epistemological approaches to AI, data and power, and speak about one case in which their research team co-designed AI with grassroots feminist data activists. Their approach models another AI, one that is boring and humble. It actually works and it is actually useful, yet it still has lots of problems.
Catherine D'Ignazio is an Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. She is also Director of the Data + Feminism Lab which uses data and computational methods to work towards gender and racial justice, particularly in relation to space and place. D'Ignazio is a scholar, artist/designer and hacker mama who focuses on feminist technology, data literacy and civic engagement. She has run reproductive justice hackathons, designed global news recommendation systems, and created talking and tweeting water quality sculptures. With Rahul Bhargava, she built the platform Databasic.io, a suite of tools and activities to introduce newcomers to data science. Her book, Data Feminism (MIT Press 2020), co-authored with Lauren F. Klein, charts a course for more ethical and empowering data science practices. Since 2019, she has co-organized Data Against Feminicide, a participatory action-research-design project, with Isadora Cruxên, Silvana Fumega and Helena Suárez Val which includes AI tools for human rights defenders. D'Ignazio's latest book,Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action(MIT Press 2024), highlights how mainstream AI and data science can learn a lot from the care and memory work of grassroots feminist data activists across the Americas.