Digital Futures Lab/Issue #17: Tech Crunch Feature, a Responsible AI Lab & a Job Opp!
Summer is here and things definitely haven’t cooled off at Digital Futures Lab! 🥵
We were featured in Tech Crunch’s series on women in AI, spoke at Stanford HAI, organised a UN roundtable and have a Responsible AI Lab in the works! 🧊❄️
Read about what we’ve been up to and what’s on the horizon, and check out our latest job opening in climate-tech research! 👇🏽
events 🎤
As part of our ongoing research project identifying opportunities and mechanisms to address gender equity concerns across the lifecycle of LLM production and deployment in India, DFL hosted 12 experts from the fields of gender and technology studies, solution design, social impact sector, linguistics, and Generative AI for a 2-day workshop. The group shared insights, comments and concerns with emergent research on gender and its intersection with tech/LLMs and co-created a journey map of plausible gender-responsive trajectories of Indic LLMs for development and social impact organisations incorporating LLMs in their interventions. Learnings and insights from this workshop will inform DFL’s final research outputs for this project, which is supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
DFL hosted a closed-door roundtable discussion among select civil society organisations from the Majority World to deliberate on the UN Secretary General’s AI advisory board report on “Governing AI for Humanity. The roundtable discussed the report and identified gaps, risks, and areas needing greater emphasis from a Majority World perspective.” Participants at the roundtable noted that the UN’s report was a welcome first step towards building a cohesive and strong global AI governance framework. The cohort noted that going forward, there were key questions that have yet to be answered adequately around the absence of critical definitions, a paucity of evidence, lack of contextual nuance, ignoring of existing AI supply chain risks and the inadequate addressing of private tech power in governing AI.
Founder and Director, Urvashi Aneja, was invited to speak at Stanford HAI’s ‘AI+Policy Symposium: A Global Stocktaking’ event, hosted at Stanford University. She was one of the speakers on a panel titled ‘Emerging Economies on the Digital Frontier: BRICS Perspectives’, along with Alison Gillwald (Executive Director, Research ICT Africa), Laura Schertel Mendes (Professor of Law, Brazilian Institute for Development, Education and Research (IDP); Rapporteur, Jurists Commission advising the Brazilian Senate on AI Regulation) and Hui Zhou (Deputy Director / Associate Professor, Department of Cyber and Information Law, Institute of Law, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences).
Research Manager, Aarushi Gupta, was invited to share her insights at the ‘Human Rights and AI Standardisation’ workshop co-organised by the AI Standards Hub, UK and the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. The objective of the workshop was to gather insights on civil society organisations’ current experience with AI standardisation. Speaking specifically to the Indian landscape, she emphasised that contextualisation of responsible AI principles such as ‘fairness’ and ‘explainability’ should precede the development of AI standards - highlighting the necessity to reimagine their conception from a Majority World perspective.
Research Associate Sasha John recently attended a game design consultation workshop by Quest Alliance in Bangalore. Quest Alliance brought together researchers, practitioners and designers from the fields of design and gaming features, youth programmes, technology, assessments and evaluations, implementation and inclusion to gather feedback and insights on the current prototype of the game targeted at young adults, and to co-create a roadmap for future design improvements.
Research Associate Anushka Jain attended a workshop co-hosted by the Association for Progressive Communications, Software Freedom Law Center and Point of View on Gendered Disinformation. Over two days, experts working at the intersection of gender, media and technology engaged in spirited discussions on topics such as information disorders, AI and elections, disinformation in rural contexts, and fact-checking among others. Anushka made a short intervention on the role of recommendation algorithms in spreading harmful content, which in this context was disinformation, based on DFL’s policy brief “Beyond Content Moderation: Additional Approaches to Addressing the Spread of Harmful Content on Social Media Platforms”.
media ✍🏽
Urvashi was featured in Tech Crunch’s latest series on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution.
In this profile, Urvashi stresses the need to focus on the broader, structural impact of AI innovation, for women in AI to study widely across disciplines to recognise AI as a product of history and culture, and for all of us to think about the concentration of power in tech more urgently.
ICYMI: Late last year, Digital Futures Lab’s founder and director, Urvashi Aneja, was interviewed by Nobel Laureate and journalist, Maria Ressa, for Al Jazeera’s ‘Studio B: Unscripted’ series on Artificial Intelligence. They tackle crucial key topics, including data colonialism, information warfare, exploitative, invisibilised labour, the need for greater public and civic education and the options we still have to determine how the future of AI, and of the planet, plays out.
Watch the full interview!
what we’re reading 📖
Shashi
📕 Gamers seek legal win that would stop developers from rendering online games unplayable by PC Gamer
Sasha
📕 Here’s Proof You Can Train an AI Model Without Slurping Copyrighted Content by WIRED
Aman
📕 Amazon Ditches 'Just Walk Out' Checkouts at Its Grocery Stores by Gizmodo
coming up ⏭
DFL is starting a capacity-strengthening program on Responsible AI, catering to social impact organisations. We shall begin recruitment of our first cohort in May.
If your organisation is interested in joining this cohort and/or collaborating with us as a knowledge partner, please reach out to the Project Coordinator for DFL’s Responsible AI Lab, Sasha John, at sasha@digitalfutureslab.in.
hiring 💼
DFL is still hiring! Check out our Careers page!
Research Associate: Climate-Tech
If you can work with a dedicated, fast-growing team of managers, researchers, external partners, and other relevant stakeholders; undertake research promptly and communicate research insights concisely to the DFL team and external partners, consider applying for our full-time Research Associate (Climate-Tech) role role. Email your CV to hello@digitalfutureslab.in with ‘Research Associate (Climate-Tech) Role’ in the subject line.
Goa-based candidates are preferred for both roles, but we are flexible.
Have an idea for creative collaboration, a future Tech and Society Dialogues event or a research partnership? Reach out to our Public Engagement Manager, Sasha John, at sasha@digitalfutureslab.in or @SashaEmJay on Twitter.
Follow Digital Futures Lab on Twitter, LinkedIn & Instagram!