Data & Society

Joanna Radin discusses the writing of Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton. Although Crichton is most famous for imagining an island of dinosaurs, metaphors in his non-fiction articles about computers that are even more terrifying.

This talk was presented for the event Future Perfect. In a moment when the future increasingly feels like a foregone conclusion, Future Perfect brought actors from a variety of world-building disciplines (from art and fiction, to law and science) together to explore the uses, abuses, and paradoxes of speculative futures. Curated by Data & Society artist-in-residence Ingrid Burrington, Future Perfect was an experimental one-day, invitation-only conference originating from insights of the institute’s regular Speculative Fiction Reading Group.

Joanna Radin is Assistant Professor of the History of Science and Medicine at Yale where she teaches feminist and indigenous STS and the history of biomedicine and anthropology. Before receiving her PhD in History and Sociology of Science at UPenn she studied science communication at Cornell and worked as a risk communication specialist. She is the author of Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood, (University of Chicago Press, 2017) and a co-editor of Cyropolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World (MIT Press, 2017). Radin is currently writing a book about science fiction, subjectivity, and biomedicine.

Ruha Benjamin's presentation entitled "designer and discarded genomes: experimenting with sociological imagination through speculative methods" uses speculative field notes to explore the antecedents and implications of the current era of genetic engineering.

This talk was presented for the event Future Perfect. In a moment when the future increasingly feels like a foregone conclusion, Future Perfect brought actors from a variety of world-building disciplines (from art and fiction, to law and science) together to explore the uses, abuses, and paradoxes of speculative futures. Curated by Data & Society artist-in-residence Ingrid Burrington, Future Perfect was an experimental one-day, invitation-only conference originating from insights of the institute’s regular Speculative Fiction Reading Group.

Ruha Benjamin is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, author of People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford University Press), and 2016-17 fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. Her work examines the social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine with a particular focus on the relationship between innovation and inequity. She earned her PhD in Sociology from UC Berkeley, completed fellowships at UCLA’s Institute for Genetics and Society and Harvard’s Science, Technology, and Society Program, and has received grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, and California Institute for Regenerative Medicine among others. Her work is published in numerous journals including Science, Technology, and Human Values; Ethnicity & Health; and Annals of the American Academy of Social and Political Science.

Suchana Seth speaks about different definitions of fairness in the context of machine learning. Suchana Seth is a physicist-turned-data scientist from India. She has built scalable data science solutions for startups and industry research labs, and holds patents in text mining and natural language processing. Suchana believes in the power of data to drive positive change, volunteers with DataKind, mentors data-for-good projects, and advises research on IoT ethics. She is also passionate about closing the gender gap in data science, and leads data science workshops with organizations like Women Who Code.

Ravi Shroff speaks about his research studying predictive models for decision-making in city and state government. Ravi Shroff is a Research Scientist at New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), where he specializes in computational social science. His work involves using statistical and machine learning techniques to understand the criminal justice system, child welfare, and related urban issues. At Data & Society, Ravi will examine how simple computational models can be designed and implemented in city government. He studied mathematics at UC San Diego (PhD) and applied urban science and informatics at CUSP (MS).

Anne Washington talks about the risks of efficiency and the need for a common language when speaking about data science and public policy. Anne L. Washington is a computer scientist and a librarian who specializes in public sector technology management and informatics. She is an Assistant Professor at George Mason University. As a digital government scholar, her research focuses on the production, meaning, and retrieval of public sector information. She developed her expertise on government data working at the Congressional Research Service within the Library of Congress. She also served as an invited expert to the W3C E-Government Interest Group and the W3C Government Linked Data Working Group. She completed a PhD from The George Washington University School of Business. She holds a degree in computer science from Brown University and a Master’s in Library Information Science from Rutgers University. Before completing her PhD, she had extensive work experience in the private sector including the Claris Software division of Apple Computers and Barclays Global Investors.