Something Had Been Ruined Forever: Interrupting AI Ethics - 10:10 EST/7:10 PST

In this talk, Anna Lauren Hoffmann interrupts the idea of "potential" in AI ethics discourse. She traces the ways it idealizes AI's development and forestalls certain critical—and especially queer—engagements with the historical and present violences perpetuated by data science and technology.

Anna Lauren Hoffmann is an Assistant Professor at The Information School, University of Washington. Her writing on data, technology, and ethics has appeared in New Media & Society, Information, Communication, & Society, The Library Quarterly, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Beyond the Binary - 1:25pm EST/10:25am PST

We will explore the intersection of genetic, neuroanatomical, psychological, and computational sciences as they relate to gender, sexuality, and society through a western cultural lens. In our continued exploration for true artificial general intelligence, we must look at the summation of research across scientific and sociological disciplines including in diversity of identity and attraction. True AGI is said to be able to adapt and transfer learnings, creating connections between domains, furthering investigation, and experience.

Laura Montoya is the founder and Managing Partner of Accel Impact Organizations, including Accel AI Institute, Latinx in AI (LXAI), and Research Colab. Her academic background is in Biology, Physical Science, and Human Development. She relocated to the San Francisco Bay area to work at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute before jump-starting her career in software engineering at Intuit revamping their Quickbooks online platform. She is a director with Women Who Code, advisor for Udacity’s AI and Data nano degree, and an affiliate with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law.

She chairs and serves on Program Committees for research workshops at AI and ML conferences including NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, and ACM FAccT. Recent research areas include reducing bias data representations in machine learning models, the effects of artificial intelligence development for developing countries, and paralleling biological and synthetic neural networks seen in mycology, entomology, and computational science.

She has led sessions on social impact, tech diversity, and ethical AI development for Creative Mornings, Katapult Future Fest, Silicon Valley Future Forum, Tech Inclusion Conference, Thrival Summit, Global Hive Summit, and keynoted the “Future of Work” for the Data and Society Conference at UC Berkeley. Laura has given guest lectures and technical workshops at Google, Santa Clara University Law, Stanford University Computational Social Science, and GTC Deep Learning School. Recently she spoke at TEDx Santa Barbara and has been featured in WITtalks and CIIS podcasts, Xconomy, Verizon News, and Forbes Leadership.