Ethics in Tech – A conversation Series

By UCLA Institute for Technology, Law & Policy | UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry | UCLA Samueli School of Engineering
Wednesday October 6 (12:00 – 1:15 p.m. PDT)

 
The third event in our series features Dr. Safiya Noble and Dr. Achuta Kadambi.

About this event

From the moment you wake up and check your messages on Facebook or Twitter, to when you set your Google Nest for the night, tech giants wield unprecedented influence over our daily lives. With this enormous power comes an enormous potential for abuse. The information economy has led to profound challenges to personal privacy. Stalkerware takes advantage of security gaps in our personal digital infrastructure to turn phones and smart home products into tools for facilitating domestic violence. Online platforms are grappling with what it means to provide fairness and due process to their users. And across the tech industry, racial and gender-based discrimination scandals suggest a need to address toxic cultures. The question of how to impose ethical guardrails on these enormously powerful actors is among the most important challenges of this generation.

This series, which has been developed as a collaborative project between the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law & Policy and the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, features conversations with leading voices in the fight for responsible conduct in the tech sector./p>

Our third session on Wednesday, October 6th from 12:00 – 1:15 pm PT, features Dr. Safiya Noble and Dr. Achuta Kadambi.

Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble is an Associate Professor at UCLA in the Departments of Information Studies and African American Studies. She is the author of a best-selling book on racist and sexist algorithmic bias in commercial search engines, entitled Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press). Dr. Noble is the co-editor of two edited volumes: The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Culture and Class Online and Emotions, Technology & Design. She currently serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, and is the co-editor of the Commentary & Criticism section of the Journal of Feminist Media Studies. She is a member of several academic journal and advisory boards, including Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education.

Safiya is the recipient of a Hellman Fellowship and the UCLA Early Career Award. Her academic research focuses on the design of digital media platforms on the internet and their impact on society. Her work is both sociological and interdisciplinary, marking the ways that digital media impacts and intersects with issues of race, gender, culture, and technology. She is regularly quoted for her expertise on issues of algorithmic discrimination and technology bias by national and international press including The Guardian, the BBC, CNN International, USA Today, Wired, Time, and The New York Times, to name a few. She holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Library & Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a B.A. in Sociology from California State University, Fresno where she was awarded the Distinguished Alumni Award for 2018.

Dr. Achuta Kadambi is an assistant professor with the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. He received the PhD degree from MIT and joined UCLA as an Assistant Professor. His publications have been presented as Orals at CVPR, ICCV, ICCP and SIGGRAPH. He is currently co-authoring a textbook (“Computational Imaging”, MIT Press 2021) and is also a co-founder in a robotic imaging startup (http://akasha.im). Achuta’s research has received several recognitions including the NSF CAREER Award, Forbes 30 under 30 (Science), Google Faculty Award, Sony Imaging Young Faculty Award, and Army Young Investigator Award (ARO-YIP).