Keynote Speakers

https://uni-tuebingen.de/en/221247

Dr. Simon David Hirsbrunner is a social scientist, media scholar and team leader at IZEW. He investigates ethical matters related to AI and often employs inventive, digital and mixed methods in his research. His current focus lies on the relationships and tensions between AI, ethics and sustainability as well as high risk application areas of AI (education, police intelligence, recruiting).

https://www.cs.unc.edu/~gaikwad/

Neil Gaikwad serves as Founding Director of the Society-Centered AI Lab (SAIL) at UNC Chapel Hill, with faculty appointments in Data Science and Computer Science. He is also a Fellow at MIT's Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values and serves on the Faculty Advisory Council for UNC's Parr Center for Ethics. Neil earned his Ph.D. in Society-Centered AI from MIT and is an alumnus of Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science. He has conducted AI research and built real-time decision systems in global financial markets. His work has been published in AI and HCI conferences and PNAS, and covered by The New York Times, Bloomberg, and WIRED. Neil has taught 500+ students, mentored 50+ researchers, and created educational programs in computing and data science. He regularly advises students, faculty, open source communities, companies, non-profits, and policymakers on responsible AI design, alignment, and governance. His recognition includes Facebook Research Fellowship, MIT Graduate Teaching Award, Rising Stars designations from Stanford and University of Chicago, and MIT's Karl Taylor Compton Prize (the Institute's highest student award). Neil was a professional cricketer and is a photographer who brings both computational thinking and artistic perspectives to AI and creativity research. His work on melting glaciers has been published in National Geographic and featured in exhibitions he hosts, and can be viewed on Instagram @neilgaikwad_creations.

https://katiaschwerzmann.net

Katia Schwerzmann is a philosopher of media and technology, focusing on the intersections of body, politics, and technology. She is an associate researcher at KWI (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, Essen, Germany) and SFB Virtuelle Lebenswelten (Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany).

Her current research examines the specific ways in which contemporary algorithmic rationality shapes knowledge, subjectivity, and sociality. Whereas earlier forms of algorithmic rationality sought to eliminate human judgment by reducing interpretation and decisions to computation and presenting machine outputs as neutral, model training in the age of generative AI functions as a normativizing process. She analyzes how generative AI, as a socio-technical system, produces new forms of power and subjectivity and regulates machine and human behavior through implicit and explicit norms.

Her work has appeared in AI & Society, Philosophy & Technology, Social Text, Big Data & Society, Appareil, and Revue des sciences humaines. Her first book, Theorie des graphischen Feldes, was published by Diaphanes in 2020.