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Session Description

Free ticketed event
As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies become embedded in common social practices, questions about the ethical design and use of AI are more pressing than ever. Responsible AI (RAI) efforts have responded to these questions, generating common sets of principles that attend to social, cultural, and environmental concerns related to emergent AI technologies. How might these principles be leveraged in engineering education to make RAI a grassroots strategy rather than a tool for “ethics washing”? This workshop introduces participants to RAI and provides a platform to discuss how it might be integrated into engineering education. Participants will complete a sample RAI module (60 minutes) in advance to serve as a baseline for reflection and design. During the workshop, we will examine specific issues covered in the RAI module and collectively redesign the module for engineering students.

Authors:
Rebecca L. Sherlock, University of Waterloo – presenting
Marcel M.G. O’Gorman, University of Waterloo – presenting
Heather A. Love, University of Waterloo – presenting
Christopher Rogers, University of Waterloo – presenting
Sarah M. Casey, University of Waterloo
Fenella Amarasinghe, York University

Speakers

1. Rebecca L. Sherlock

   University of Waterloo

   Rebecca Sherlock is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo and a Design Director in the technology sector. Her research explores the intersection of responsible innovation, critical design, and ethical technology design, with special interest in how these topics are realized within industry. As a member of the University of Waterloo’s Critical Media Lab (CML), she engages in research to understand how responsible innovation might be integrated directly into technological design practices.

2. Marcel M.G. O’Gorman

   University of Waterloo

   Professor Marcel O’Gorman is a University Research Chair and Founding Director of the Critical Media Lab (CML). The CML supports the design and development of research and creative projects that explore the impacts of technology on society and the more than human world. O’Gorman has published widely about tech issues in both academic and public contexts, including articles and op-eds in The Atlantic, Slate, The Globe and Mail, and The Conversation. He is also a practicing artist with an international portfolio of exhibitions and performances.

3. Dr. Heather A Love

   Heather A. Love is an assistant professor of English at the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada), where she conducts interdisciplinary research and teaches courses on topics related to literature, culture, technology, health, and engineering. Her first monograph, “Cybernetic Aesthetics: Modernist Networks of Information and Data” (forthcoming from Cambridge UP) traces a cultural pre-history to the technological field of mid- to late-twentieth-century cybernetics in the experimental work of modernist authors such as Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Modernism/modernity, the Journal of Modern Literature, the Johns Hopkins Guide to Cultural and Critical Theory and IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, for which she currently serves as Editor-in-Chief. Heather is an elected Member-at-Large on the Board of Governors for the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology (SSIT).

4. Christopher Rogers

   University of Waterloo

   Christopher Rogers is a PhD student in English. He completed his BA in Political Science at the University of Toronto and his MA in Experimental Digital Media at Waterloo. His research explores the rhetoric of watery spaces – shores, riverbanks, beaches – as places where the vibrancy of the material world comes into focus. Chris’ work asks what hopeful paths forward we can imagine, observe, and create when we pause and consider our entanglements with the nonhuman world.