Speaker series (Inclusivity in AI panel 2)

Dr. Renée Sieber and the I2Hub...

Moderated by Ruth Bankey

Tuesday, November 12, 2024 (13:00 - 14:30 EST)

What are systemic black boxes in AI systems – considerations for meaningful inclusion and participation

In this session we will focus on how the public (and the role of publics) plays an essential role in flipping open black box lids through structures of public participation in AI systems decision making from cradle to grave. In this session we explore the importance of always seeing AI systems as socio-technical and socio-political technical systems. Like the previous session we will also explore the different ways in which individuals are thinking about how to blow-up these black boxes with a view towards diversity, inclusion, belonging and justice. This may involve extending XAI practices to wider contexts and systems, or entirely different approaches and tactics that are more participatory or holistic in nature.

This builds on the first Inclusiveness and AI panel in which we focused on “black box” problems in the context of financial AI systems. We focused on ways in which decision making within banking AI systems are obscured from view, and how we can both expose some of these financial decision-making black boxes and counter or transform these systems to be more transparent or fair.

About the speaker:

Renée Sieber

Dr. Renée Sieber is an Associate Professor at McGill University in Montreal. She has 20+ years experience working at the intersection of civic empowerment and computational technologies. She is best known for her research and practice on public participation in computerized mapping and in climate modelling. She is the principal investigator for AI for the Rest of Us and Meaningfully Engaging the Public in Artificial Intelligence both are multi-year projects funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Where she has been working to develop a new model of civic engagement in government decision-making processes that are being automated with artificial intelligence. She is currently researching public participation in GeoAI and is advising the design of two AI risk assessment tools. Oh, and she also conducts research on supervised and unsupervised classification and has done some computer vision feature detection.

About the moderator

Ruth Bankey

Dr. Ruth Bankey is on the Board of Directors of the Inclusive Innovation Hub (I2Hub), which creates & supports a community of transformation in inclusive innovation practice and research by increasing access, co-creating new knowledge, building networks & collaborating to rethink what inclusivity means in & for innovation. As a part of the I2Hub she is working on developing, with other members, an “inclusive innovation prototype for systems change” as a part of the 2024 u-lab 2x cohort, U-school for transformation, Presencing Institute, MIT. She is a collaborator on SSHRC Partnership Development Grant entitled “Enabling Systems Transitions towards Inclusive Innovation”, for which the I2Hub plays a leadership role and for which she is specifically concerned to address the question of What are leading practices in inclusiveness in the development of Artificial Intelligence Technologies? Her focus on inclusive innovation also extends to other areas of her work for example, as a collaborator on “Meaningfully Engaging the Public in Artificial Intelligence a SSHRC Insights Grant”. Her role as the Chair of the Board of Directors for both the Capacity Building Institute of Canada (CBI) and Sustainable Capacity Solutions, both of which are environmental NGOs whose vision is to see the environmental non-profit sector equipped with the crucial tools and resources needed to overcome capacity constraints and foster community resilience. Her role as a head judge for the inaugural National Canada Wide Science Fair (CWSF) Judging Team (approx.. 20-person team) and the Regeneron ISEF Fair judging panel to select AI ( and other) projects for team Canada. And her work for one of the Canada Revenue Agency’s Program areas in its Business Intelligence, Research & Analytics Division (BIRAD).