Race, Surveillance and All the Things
Sharad Goel, MS & E, CS, Sociology and the Law School and Mutale Nkonde, Digital Civil Society Lab
Professor Goel, Assistant Professor of Management Science & Engineering, and by courtsesy in Computer Science, Sociology & the Law School at Stanford University looks at public policy through the lens of computer science, bringing a computational perspective to a diverse range of contemporary social issues. Some topics he has recently worked on are: policing practices, including statistical tests for discrimination; fair machine learning, including in automated speech recognition; and U.S. elections, including swing voting, polling errors, voter fraud, and political polarization.
Mutale Nkonde is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Digital Civil Society Lab. She is currently the Executive Director of AI for the People a non profit that seeks to use popular culture to educate Black audiences about the social justice implications of the use of AI Technologies in public life. She is also a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and prior to this she was an AI Policy advisor and was part of a team that introduced Algorithmic Accountability and Deep Fakes Accountability Acts to the US House of Representatives as well as the No Barriers to Biometric Barriers Act. Her work sits at the intersection of race and technology and she is fascinated by how the ideas that uphold systemic racism in the analogue world are advanced and reproduced through the design and deployment of advanced technical systems. Nkonde’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Fast Company and Harvard Business Review and she speaks widely on these issues.