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SUMMARY:How can AI be used for Social Good? Lessons from Africa’s Voices
  Foundation - Luke Church (University of Cambridge)
DTSTART:20190530T131500Z
DTEND:20190530T140000Z
UID:TALK124813@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Mariana Marasoiu
DESCRIPTION:Advanced computational technologies suffer from a growing cata
 logue of failure and abuse and heightened concern over their use to to ext
 ract and harvest personal data\, seemingly with consent\, to build systems
  that commodify\, disempower or manipulate ‘users'. Yet are standard lar
 ge-scale social research instruments such as surveys sufficiently better? 
 In Global South contexts\, citizens are too often commodified research sub
 jects\, disempowered in the very act of handing over personal information 
 to an opaque research exercise with obscure policy or intervention outcome
 s.  \n\nThis seminar explores learnings from Africa’s Voices Foundation\
 , a non-profit start-up spun out combined socio-political and technologica
 l research at Cambridge. From Nairobi and Cambridge\, AVF works with partn
 ers such as UNICEF\, Oxfam\, the MasterCard Foundation and many others to 
 help them "listen intelligently"\, with speed\, scale and depth\, to the v
 iews of the citizens whom they serve. To do this\, we design socio-technic
 al systems that subvert the extractive\, commodifying and dehumanising log
 ics of mainstream artificial intelligence and research instrument approach
 es. This requires accepting the methodological and technical burden that c
 omes from engaging with citizens as social agents rather than extracting f
 rom subjects as sources of data. To listen_rather_than_sense\, we use AI t
 o augment human capabilities for interpreting social evidence rather than 
 to automate data-driven decision-making. AVF’s learnings shed a light on
  what technological innovation\, driven by socially-conscious applications
  of AI\, might look like if not tied to commodification\, power or control
 \, but aimed at humane goals to advance social good. 
LOCATION:SS03 Meeting Room\, Computer Laboratory
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