Humanising AI Futures: Reimagining data and AI for a future worth wanting

Programme and more conference details

In this half-day symposium, we ask: How are data and AI influencing the ways in which we live and relate to one another? How might data and AI be better designed and governed to support cohesive societies? How can we identify and remove barriers standing in the way of promoting positive social change through these emerging technologies?

Few aspects of everyday life have not been affected by data and AI. Social media sites use it to suggest jobs, partners, and leisure activities. AI and machine learning predict who will learn, steal, or default on loan repayments. New knowledge infrastructures sort through massive troves of data to help us find needles in haystacks, and make new discoveries about the world. Technological mediation is transforming everyday practices like eating, sleeping, banking, dating, learning, driving, exercise, and even dating.

Technologies designed and deployed with inadequate regard for our social, political, economic, and environmental contexts, risk undermining core values and jeopardise our future. Understanding technology in context is not a “nice-to-have”. History has shown the damage that technologies can do when they develop unhinged from human values like equality, solidarity and sustainability, or when they fail to account for the people for whom they are ultimately created. A world so steeped in data and AI needs visionary thinkers to shape technologies that will create a better future.

Researchers in the UTS Data and AI Ethics cluster work to understand how and why people create, use, misuse, and abuse data, AI, and automation technologies. We work with government, industry, and NGOs to design, deploy, and provide advice on how to govern data and AI technologies. We work across the disciplines, professions, and sectors to investigate technologies both creatively and rigorously. We put into practice the principles of our public university of technology, and draw on its unique strengths to reimagine how data and AI technologies can foster the common good. Our strengths come from sharing our distinct disciplinary specialties, and our transdisciplinary collaborations.

The speaker and panel discussions for this event will conclude at 1:00pm followed by a light lunch 1:00-2:00pm for those who are attending in-person. 

We are also streaming this event live via Zoom. Please select "attending online" during registration and the link will be be sent to you a day before the event or in the confirmation email. 

Welcome: Professor Alan Davison, Dean, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney

Opening remarks: Professor Kate McGrath, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research), University of Technology Sydney

Keynote speaker: Professor Heather Horst, Western Sydney University

Lead Curator: Associate Professor Heather Ford, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney