Speakers

Manu Chopra

Bio: Manu Chopra is the Co-Founder and CEO of Karya, and he works on tackling extreme poverty by providing dignified digital work to rural Indians. In the last 5 years, his work has moved over 100,000 rural Indians out of poverty. In 2017, he graduated from Stanford University, where he co-founded CS+Social Good, Stanford's first student group focused on technology & impact. He has also taught several tech for good courses in Stanford's Computer Science Department. Students in his classes have built projects that reached over 30 million people in 15 countries around the globe. Karya is Manu’s third social impact venture.  In 2023, he was named by Time Magazine among the 100 Most Influential People in AI.  

Abstract: Annual data generation is worth $100 billion globally, but the digital workers driving the industry don’t see much of the benefit, with workers in the field typically earning less than USD $0.10 per hour. After discovering that Indian-language data sets were being sold at as much as 200 times the cost of collecting the information, Manu Chopra co-founded the nonprofit Karya to provide ethical digital work to rural Indians. Using crowdsourcing, Karya (named after the Sanskrit word for “work that gives one dignity”) offers job opportunities to people in rural communities who compile local-language speech data sets, do document digitization, and perform image annotation and labeling tasks. Karya pays well over the Indian minimum wage— nearly 20 times —and Karya’s 32,000 workers have completed 35 million paid digital tasks on its platform. Wherever possible, Karya’s workers own their datasets and earn life-long royalties from future resales. This talk will describe Karya's journey so far, the challenges it has faced, and what lies ahead.

Aspen K.B. Omapang

Bio: Aspen K.B. Omapang is a social scientist who traces her heritage through the Visayas in the Philippines and, for the last century, the Kohala pali on Hawai’i Island. As a PhD candidate in information science at Cornell University, she seeks to center Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) traditional land relations in the development of sustainability policy. She also investigates the legibility of Native Hawaiian voices to state and federal governments. All of which are directly influenced by her kuleana (responsibility) to mālama the ‘āina (care for the land).

Abstract: Indigeneity and decolonization are rising in use across disciplines as Native ways of knowing garner greater visibility and legitimacy with the academe. However, it is not often that academics adequately contend with the historical and present effects of colonialism. Specifically, tangible efforts to redistribute resources to Native community and engage with relational epistemologies. These are not just historical arguments. Academic conferences in Hawai’i are actively stealing water from Native communities, US universities are refusing to return stolen Native bodies, and researchers are appropriating Native DNA nonconsensually. As academics, these tensions follow our institutions through our funders and research epistemologies, both of which can cause harm. Pulling from critiques of academic positionality and grounded resistance work to academic conferences in Hawai’i, this talk will contend with moving beyond concepts and into material action.