Data Feminism for AI

Date
Wed April 24th 2024, 4:30 - 6:00pm
Location
John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Rotunda, E241 at the ChEM-H / Neuro research complex

Join us for a lecture on "Data Feminism for AI" by Professor Lauren Klein (Departments of English and Quantitative Theory and Methods at Emory University).  The talk will be centered around how principles around Data Feminism can be applied to conversations around AI in our current technological landscape. The lecture will be followed up by a panel by Professors Adrian Daub and Chiara Sabatti of Stanford University, and a reception at 6 pm. RSVP is necessary for entry.

In Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020), Klein and her coauthor Catherine D'Ignazio established a set of principles for doing more just and equitable data science. Informed by the past several decades of intersectional feminist activism and critical thought, the principles of data feminism modeled how to examine and challenge power, rethink binaries and hierarchies, elevate emotion and embodiment, consider context, embrace pluralism, and make labor visible. How can these principles be applied to the current conversation about AI, its present harms, and its future possibilities? This talk will briefly summarize the principles of data feminism before moving to a set of examples that show how these principles can be applied–and extended–in our current technological landscape.

Please RSVP for this talk via this Eventbrite Link.

This talk is jointly hosted by the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), and Stanford Data Science, and co-sponsored by the Stanford University Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI)The Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and the Stanford Humanities Center.

4:00 PM - 4:30 PM -- Registration & networking

4:30 PM - 6:00 PM -- Data Feminism for AI Presentation, Panel, and Q&A

6:00 PM - 6:30 PM -- Networking reception

About Lauren Klein

Lauren Klein is Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor in the departments of Quantitative Theory & Methods and English at Emory University. At Emory, she also serves as director of the Digital Humanities Lab and PI of the Mellon-funded Atlanta Interdisciplinary AI Network. Previously, she taught in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. Klein’s research brings together computational and critical methods in order to explore questions of gender, race, and justice, both in the past and in the present. She is the author of An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and, with Catherine D’Ignazio, the award-winning Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020). With Matthew K. Gold, she edits Debates in the Digital Humanities, a hybrid print-digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge. Her work has appeared in leading humanities journals including PMLA, American Literature, and American Quarterly; and at technical conferences including ACL, EMNLP, and IEEE VIS. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the ACLS, the NEH, and the Mellon Foundation. Her next major project, Data by Design: An Interactive History of Data Visualization, is forthcoming from the MIT Press in 2024.

About Adrian Daub

Adrian Daub is the Barbara D. Finberg Director of the Clayman Institute, a position he began in 2019. He is the J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor of the Humanities and a professor of comparative literature and German studies in the School of Humanities and Sciences. Daub also has served as director of the Andrew W. Mellon Program for Postdoctoral Studies in the Humanities, director of undergraduate studies for the Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, director of German studies, and director of the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Daub is the 11th director and the first man to lead the Clayman Institute for Gender Research. He writes about politics, literature, culture, and universities for German and Swiss newspapers and for Anglo-American outlets. Together with Laura Goode, he hosts the Clayman Institute’s podcast, The Feminist Present, which features interviews with a range of feminist voices. For the podcast In Bed With the Right, Moira Donegan and Daub welcome scholars and critics to analyze right wing ideas about gender, sex and sexuality – and to plumb the ways in which these ideas persist in and shape our present moment. Daub’s research focuses on the intersection of literature, music and philosophy, particularly in the 19th century. His book Uncivil Unions - The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealism and Romanticism explores German philosophical theories of marriage from Kant to Nietzsche. His book Tristan's Shadow - Sexuality and the Total Work of Art deals with eroticism in German opera after Wagner. Four-Handed Monsters ties the practice of four-hand piano playing to ideologies about gender, labor, and the family in nineteenth-century Europe. In addition, he has published articles on opera, film, and poetry, as well as literature and scandal. Daub began on the Stanford faculty in 2008, after earning a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. He also earned a master’s there in 2004, and a bachelor’s from Swarthmore College in 2003. For more detail about his work and publications, visit www.adriandaub.com

About Chiara Sabatti

Chiara grew up in Italy. She got a BS+MS in "Economics and Social Sciences" (DES) from the Bocconi University in Milan, where, among other things, she was schooled in the beauty of Bayesian Statistics. After trying out the US graduate school system for a semester at Brandeis, she came to Stanford in 1994 to pursue a PhD in Statistics, and has been in California ever since. Her graduate work was with Jun Liu on multiscale MCMC methods. She then went on to be a post-doctoral scholar with Neil Risch in the Department of Genetics, also at Stanford. In 2000 she joined the faculty at UCLA in the newly established departments of Human Genetics and Statistics. After 9 happy years in sunny southern California, she came back north with her family. She is one of the founding members of the department of Biomedical Data Science and one of the associate directors of Stanford Data Science, as well as a professor of Statistics (her first love). Chiara's research is centered on the development of statistical methods that enable the exploration of high dimensional data. This entails both reducing computational barriers and ensuring that the results obtained by sifting through a large number of variables are reliable, reproducible, and robust. Her work is by nature interdisciplinary: she has enjoyed collaborating with neuroscientists, engineers, chemists, psychiatrists, oncologists, and more in her home institutions and around the globe. She is grateful that her background prepared her for this.