Welcome to Critical Tech Talk, a series of honest dialogues about technological innovation.
Assembling a diverse group of stakeholders — including both developers and end-users — the series is designed to promote an ethos of responsible innovation in the local tech ecology and beyond. Each of the university’s six faculties will co-host a techno-critical speaker and invite Waterloo students and local tech sector members to participate in an on-stage dialogue and lead a post-event discussion online.
Critical Tech Talk is produced by the Critical Media Lab at the University of Waterloo. The series is sponsored by Communitech, the Office of Research, and faculties of Arts, Environment, Engineering, Health, Math, and Science at the University of Waterloo.
Critical Tech Talk 12: Vibe Coding with AI for Cancer Detection - Building Mini Medical Machines in the Shadow of “Big Tech”
July 24, 2025, 4:30 to 6:00 PM | HH 1102 | REGISTER
Join the Critical Tech Talk series to hear about how “vibe coding”, a flexible, intuition-driven approach to prototyping can empower people from non-computing backgrounds to shape the medical tools they actually need.
About the talk
As AI becomes increasingly embedded in healthcare and creative workflows, the boundary between expert and end-user is blurring. This talk explores how “vibe coding”, a flexible, intuition-driven approach to prototyping can empower people from non-computing backgrounds to shape the medical tools they actually need. Drawing from experience building fast, lightweight AI utilities for cancer detection and clinical documentation, the speaker examines how small-scale code experiments can unlock agency and challenge institutional inertia. In this session, the speaker hopes to generate discussion on how personal toolmaking can offer an alternative to extractive models of technological development, fostering more grounded and human-centered applications of technology in medicine and beyond.
About the speaker
Dr. Josh Del Papa is a resident physician in Diagnostic and Molecular Pathology at the University of Western Ontario. He completed medical school at Queen’s University and holds a PhD in biochemistry with a specialization in human and molecular genetics from the University of Ottawa. His research bridges diagnostic dermatopathology, physician-centered interface design, and artificial intelligence, with a focus on transparent, clinician-empowering tools. He is currently developing a fully offline AI platform that classifies skin cancers in real-time. The system is designed to augment intraoperative consultations through a human-in-the-loop approach, without relying on the cloud or opaque black-box systems
Respondents
Dr. Helen Chen is Director of the Professional Practice Centre in Health Systems and serves as Program Lead of the Master of Health Informatics and Analytics program. Her expertise lies in health data analytics and the interoperability of health information systems. Dr. Chen’s research explores the application of machine learning and generative AI to enhance the accessibility and usability of real-world health data, supporting evidence-based decision-making in healthcare and public health.
Dr. Jim Wallace is Professor in the School of Public Health Sciences with a cross-appointment in the Cheriton School of Computer Science. His research explores the intersection of human-computer interaction and health. He has published widely on topics including human-centered design, games for health behaviour change, and AI support for qualitaitve research. His work has received awards at the CHI and CSCW conferences, and is funded by NSERC, NRC, and CFI-JELF.
Dr. Plinio Morita is Director of the Ubiquitous Health Technology Lab (UbiLab). His research interests are in the areas of population-level surveillance using IoT data, mHealth and wearable technology design, ubiquitous sensors for smart homes, usage data and health data analytics, precision medicine, and technology for aging. He focuses on personalized medicine technologies that can prevent unnecessary visits to hospitals and drive our healthcare system toward community care and telehealth.
Moderator
Dr. Marcel O'Gorman, University Research Chair, professor of English, and founding director of the Critical Media Lab (CML), University of Waterloo. Professor O'Gorman leads collaborative design projects and teaches courses and workshops in critical media studies and responsible innovation. He has published widely about the impacts of technology on society, and he has an international portfolio of exhibitions and performances.
Critical Tech Talk Pop-Up: An Energy History and Future of Big/Little Tech
Tuesday, June 24, 2023 | 4:00 p.m. EDT | East Campus Hall, room 1205 | REGISTER
About the talk
This talk will survey two trajectories for computing in North America. The first, grounded in an energy history of major players in the tech sector, explores how energy efficiency has been both a driving economic force of our digital present and an insufficient means to mitigate its rapidly growing environmental impacts. The second, drawn from artists and hackers experimenting in degrowth computing, 'small tech,' and solar-powered networks, explores how energy constraints are producing an alternative and dissonant path. Thinking these trajectories together, the talk will outline a politics and practice of digital energetics.
About the speaker
Anne Pasek is an Assistant Professor at Trent University, dividing her time between the Department of Cultural Studies and the Trent School of the Environment. Her work explores the environmental impacts of digital technologies, the cultural politics of climate change, and critical making/artistic practices that might provide new avenues through these tricky problems. Her books include Digital Energetics (Meson Press 2023) and Low-Carbon Research Methods (Goldsmiths, forthcoming 2025).
Moderator
Dr. Marcel O'Gorman, University Research Chair, professor of English, and founding director of the Critical Media Lab (CML), University of Waterloo. Professor O'Gorman leads collaborative design projects and teaches courses and workshops in critical media studies and responsible innovation. He has published widely about the impacts of technology on society, and he has an international portfolio of exhibitions and performances.
Critical Tech Talk 11: Speculative Imaginaries and Technological Design
Friday, January 24, 2025 | 3:00 p.m. EST | Online
About the talk
Speculative fiction (sf) is an influential mode that shapes how we imagine what technologies and futures we find desirable, feasible, and valuable. But whose values inform imagined techno-utopian futures? How can we draw on the power of sf if we understand the genre not as a storehouse of technologies we might one day create, but instead as a critical engagement with the way that technology inevitably shapes the social world in ways that extend far beyond its intended use? Using the example of the intersection of sf with disability studies, this talk will outline how sf can function as a mode of enquiry, a rhetorical tool that can help us guide technological development toward greater inclusion and equity by opening new perspectives on the problems technology seeks to solve. Focusing on the specific example of sf written from the perspective of people with disability, it will show how such fictions can help us understand how to cultivate a more capacious social imagination as a crucial element of equitable and inclusive technological design.
About the speaker
Sherryl Vint is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and of English at the University of California, Riverside, where she founded the Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science program. She has published widely on science fiction, including, most recently, Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First Century Speculative Fiction (2021), Science Fiction: The Essential Knowledge (2021), and Programming the Future: Speculative Television and the End of Democracy (2022, co-authored with Jonathan Alexander). She was a founding editor of Science Fiction Film and Television and is the Managing Editor of Science Fiction Studies and editor of book series Science in Popular Culture.
Respondents
Dr. Lauren Judge is an interdisciplinary geographer currently working as a Research Associate at Wilfrid Laurier University. Originally from Kitchener, Ontario, she completed a Bachelor of Arts degree at York University (2003), a Master of Arts at the University of Waterloo (2005), and her PhD at Wilfrid Laurier University (2024). Since 2009, Lauren has practiced professionally as a visual artist who experiments with painting on canvas and paper and multimedia installations that include handmade textiles, ceramics and mosaics. Lauren's research and arts practice explores subjects like ecofeminism, more-than-human world-making, speculative futures and the pluriverse.
Liahm Ruest, MA, BSc (UWaterloo) is an MSc candidate in Biology at the University of Waterloo. They have previously completed their MA in Rhetoric and Communications Design, focusing on science communications. They are currently working on urban ecology projects within the interdisciplinary RISE (Residential Development Impact Scorecard for the Environment) project. Their research interests are biodiversity in cities, the rhetoric of science, and photography in science communication. Their current research uses metagenomics and environmental DNA to classify biota in urban stormwater systems.
Moderator
Marcel O’Gorman is a University Research Chair, Professor of English, and Founding Director of the Critical Media Lab (CML), where he teaches courses, leads collaborative projects, and directs workshops in digital design and the philosophy of technology. The CML is located inside the Communitech Hub in Kitchener, where its role is to disseminate a philosophy of “tech for good.”
Critical Tech Talk 10: Ecomedia and the Cost of Technological Progress
Monday, October 7, 2024 | 4:30 to 6:00 PM
Watch the recording of Ecomedia & the Cost of Tech Progress
Join guest speaker Cajetan Iheka, Professor of English at Yale University, discussing the cost of technological innovation among communities of colour in the West and global south.
About the talk
The affordance of technology is the improvement of human lives and societies. Advancements in technology have contributed to improved life and efficiency for human societies. But what is the cost of technological innovation and who bears the brunt? Communities of color in the West and global south societies have often suffered the consequences of technological progress. This talk turns to ecological media produced about extraction in Africa to highlight the exacting cost of innovative progress across the continent and the rerouting of low-tech infrastructure to reconstitute the fragmented social.
About the speaker
Cajetan Iheka is Professor of English at Yale University, where he specializes in African literature, ecocriticism, ecomedia, and postcolonial literature. He serves as director of the Whitney Humanities Center, chair of the Council on African Studies, and head of the Africa Initiative at Yale. Professor Iheka is the author or editor of four books, including Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Naturalizing Africa won the 2019 Ecocriticism Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and the 2020 First Book Prize of the African Literature Association. His African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Duke University Press, 2021) received six book prizes and honors, including the 2022 African Studies Association Best Book Prize, the Ecocriticism Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and the Harold and Margaret Sprout Award of the International Studies Association.
Respondent
Dr. Paul Ugor is a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of Modern African Literatures and Cultures, Anglophone Postcolonial World Literatures, Cultural Studies, Global Black Studies, and New Media Cultures in the Global South. He is the author of Nollywood: Popular Culture and Narratives of Youth Struggles in Nigeria (2016) and co-editor of several collections including, Youth and Popular Culture in Africa: Media, Music, and Politics (2021) and African Youth Cultures in the Age of Globalization: Challenges, Agency, and Resistance (2017).
Respondent
Adwoa Appiah, BSc (KNUST), MSc (Oxon), EMBA (Univ of Ghana) is a PhD candidate in Sustainability Management at the University of Waterloo’s School of Environment, Enterprise, and Development (SEED). She has previously worked with leading financial institutions in Africa including the African Development Bank and Ecobank where she gained experience in environmental management and sustainability as well corporate and transaction banking. Her research interests are in sustainability management with emphasis on sustainable banking, sustainable finance and climate governance. Her current research focuses on commercial banks in Africa’s contribution to sustainability and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Moderator
Dr. Marcel O'Gorman, University Research Chair, professor of English, and founding director of the Critical Media Lab (CML), University of Waterloo. Professor O'Gorman leads collaborative design projects and teaches courses and workshops in the philosophy of technology at the CML, which is located at the Communitech Hub. The role of the CML is to disseminate a philosophy of "tech for good."
Critical Tech Talk 9: Perspectives on Accelerating AI Adoption
Tuesday, June 25, 2024 at 4:00 p.m. in the Communitech Hub
About the talk
Join us to explore the impact of the Voluntary Code of Conduct on the Responsible Development and Management of Advanced Generative AI Systems. The code, introduced by the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Industry, aims to foster public trust in AI technologies, intending to accelerate adoption. This engaging panel discussion featuring education leaders, computer science researchers and industry experts will explore the broader implications of accelerating AI adoption beyond economic impacts. Speakers will share insights, hopes and concerns about the potential societal changes, ethical considerations and regulatory challenges that come with AI. The talk will be moderated by Dr. Marcel O’Gorman, founding director of the Critical Media Lab.
About the speakers
Craig Haney is a leader in commercializing innovation and championing the technology ecosystem. As Head of Ventures at AltaML, he drives the growth of new and existing ventures. With extensive experience at some of Canada's top tech companies, including Canadian Tire and ApplyBoard, Craig has successfully overseen innovation and technology initiatives and currently serves on the board for Propel Accelerator.
Kyle Jensen is a Professor of English and Director of Writing Programs at Arizona State University. He has authored or co-edited six books, including "Kenneth Burke’s Weed Garden" (Penn State University Press, 2022). His research on writing instruction, AI, and public literacy has been featured in The Washington Post and Times Higher Education, with NEH support. He is working on two new books: "Time to Listen" and "Story Problems: How to be Curious About Generative AI."
Vince Yang is currently a Senior Product Manager at Vidyard and has worked in diverse B2B landscapes spanning content collaboration software, healthcare, and marketing & sales technologies. Most recently, he led the development and launch of Vidyard's AI Avatars. He's invigorated by the transformative potential of the latest advancements in Generative AI, envisioning a future where technology catalyzes genuine human interactions.
Edith Law is an Associate Professor and Director of the Augmented Intelligence Lab at the University of Waterloo. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard and holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon. Her research interests include social computing, human-machine interaction, and designing technology to promote human values. Her work has received awards at CHI, CSCW, and DIS conferences, and is funded by NSERC and CFI-JELF. She is currently focused on designing tools and systems for value discovery and collaboration.
Critical Tech Talk Popup: Teaching Writing After Generative AI: An Expert Panel, Open Conversation and Workshop
Monday, June 24, 2024, 9:00 a.m to 12:00 p.m. in the Davis Centre Library, University of Waterloo
Join this workshop event for instructors who are grappling with challenges faced by generative AI, specifically in writing assignments.
All instructors are invited, though we will focus on instructors of writing. This is an inclusive event designed to foster dialogue; naysayers and early adopters are equally welcome. The event will feature Kyle Jensen, Director of Writing Programs at Arizona State University, who will co-facilitate with pedagogy leaders from across campus, including Antonio Muñoz Gómez (Library), Clare Bermingham (Writing and Communication Centre), Trevor Holmes (Centre for Teaching Excellence), Megan Selinger (Undergraduate Communications Requirement), Jay Dolmage (Department of English), and Karen Lochead (Centre for Extended Learning). The session will be moderated by Dr. Marcel O’Gorman, founding director of the Critical Media Lab.
Critical Tech Talk 8: Humility as a Value in Engineering and Design
Friday, March 22, 2024 at 4:00 p.m. in Arts Lecture Hall (AL) 116
Watch the recording of Humility as a Value in Engineering and Design
About the talk
"Responsible, sustainable, and equitable technological design requires a culture of engineering whose values reflect these intended design outcomes. In this talk, I use the Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer – the Rudyard Kipling text that forms the basis of the iron ring ceremony – as a space to explore changing understandings of humility as an engineering value. While humility has long been positively associated with engineering practice, the humble engineer portrayed in Kipling’s poetry is a different figure than the engineer humbled by technology who is often presented in contemporary discussions of the iron ring and the Ritual. I argue that our understanding of engineering humility has implications for the ways that we think about and enact responsibility in engineering and technological design. Connecting recent discourse around the Ritual to the idea of humility, I suggest that engineers can work towards responsibility, sustainability, and equity in design by practicing humility as respect of other ways of knowing, doing, being, and making."
A special introduction will be made by Dr. Mary Wells, Dean, Faculty of Engineering.
About the speaker
Kari Zacharias is an Assistant Professor in the Centre for Engineering Professional Practice and Engineering Education at the University of Manitoba. Her work focuses on the intersections between engineering knowledges and other disciplines and knowledge cultures. She has a background in engineering and in science and technology studies, and she is a founding member and co-facilitator of the Retool the Ring group.
Respondents
Jennifer Howcroft is a Lecturer in the Department of Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo. Her research encompasses technical and pedagogical research areas. Her pedagogical research focuses on engineering education, in particular engineering design, holistic engineering education, empathy, and values. Her technical research is predominantly focused on sensor-based human movement analysis encompassing signal analysis, big data analytics, and artificial intelligence techniques.
Naomi Paul (She/Her) is a Métis woman who grew up here in Waterloo region. This is outside of the Georgian Bay Métis Community, which is her family's hometown. She is currently pursuing her PhD in the Department of Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo, where she completed both her undergraduate and master's degrees in Systems Design Engineering as well. Naomi's research focuses on bridging Indigenous and Western knowledge within STEM, recognizing that Indigenous Perspectives have long been excluded from education, but will play a crucial role in our progress towards reconciliation.
Moderator
Professor Marcel O'Gorman, University Research Chair, professor of English, and founding director of the Critical Media Lab (CML), University of Waterloo. Professor O'Gorman leads collaborative design projects and teaches courses and workshops in the philosophy of technology at the CML, which is located at the Communitech Hub. The role of the CML is to disseminate a philosophy of "tech for good."
Critical Tech Talk Popup: How to Build Anything Ethically
Tuesday, November 21, 2023, 11:30 a.m.
Watch the recording of How to Build Anything Ethically
This discussion of ethical decision making when building technologies in a ‘Good Way’ includes two examples. First, I illustrate how the protocol for building a Lakota sweat lodge can act as a framework for building a physical computing device. Next, I provide an example of how multiple streams of protocol are necessary to build an AI system as a confluence of ethics. Some ideas proposed here are not currently possible, some are possible if investment is made in the necessary research, and some are possible but only through a radical change in the way technology companies are run and the pyramid of compensation for the exploitation of resources is reversed.
About the speaker
Suzanne Kite is an award-winning Oglála Lakȟóta artist, composer, and academic. Her scholarship and practice explore contemporary Lakȟóta ontology (the study of beinghood in Lakȟóta), artificial intelligence, and contemporary art and performance. She creates interfaces and arranges software systems that engage the whole body, in order to imagine new ethical AI protocols that interrogate past, present, and future Lakȟóta philosophies.
Critical Tech Talk 7: Black Media Philosophy and Beyond with Armond R. Towns
Wednesday, September 20, 2023, 5:00 - 6:30 p.m. | Watch the recording of Black Media Philosophy
This Critical Tech Talk event features Armond R. Towns, on the modern research university, race, and communication and media studies. Following the talk, there will be a short reception for in-person attendees at the Science Teaching Complex (STC).
About the talk
Much of the contemporary research on race in communication media studies begins with media representations. However, for this talk, Armond R. Towns will focus on the relationship between the modern research university, race, and the development of communication and media studies in the early and mid-twentieth century, with a focus specifically on US and Canadian communication and media studies. Like the modern university, the discipline of communication and media studies, Towns argues, has a difficulty with understanding non-Western life. This talk is a beginning conversation on how to push toward new forms of understanding humanity beyond Western life. The topic of “who counts as human” is crucial in a context where big tech aims to control the future of so-called humanity and the AI race closes the gap between human and machine communications.
About the speaker
Armond R. Towns is an associate professor in Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Communication. His research brings together Black studies, cultural studies, and media philosophy. His book, On Black Media Philosophy, was published in 2022 with the University of California Press. He is also the co-founder and inaugural editor of the journal, Communication and Race. Currently, he is developing a project on the relationship between the history of communication studies and the history of Black studies, focusing specifically on the development of both fields in U.S. and Canada.
About the respondent
Tolulope Awobusuyi is an environmental software consultant and PhD student in Geography and Environmental Management. His research looks at the relationship between visual culture and Blackness, primarily through photography and film, and how Black spatiality is produced in media at the narrative level. He is also interested in the philosophies and epistemologies of design practice, particularly in technology and media.
Critical Tech Talk 6 — Clean Energy, Climate Justice & Indigenous Rights: From extractive, colonial capitalism to equitable, flourishing alternatives.
Thursday, July 20, 2023, 5:00 - 6:00 p.m.
Watch the recording of Clean Energy, Climate Justice & Indigenous Rights
About the talk
The climate crisis calls for a massive and speedy transition away from fossil fuels towards energy systems based on renewable, clean sources like the sun, the wind and the tides. But to date, what we’re seeing is a move towards extractive, large-scale, corporate-owned for-profit models of green energy. These so-called solutions are replicating the social and environmental injustices perpetrated by the fossil fuel industry, including the rampant violation of Indigenous Rights and desecration of their lands and waters .
Upholding indigenous rights and fighting for a climate just future for all requires not just a change in energy sources, but a transformation in the very systems of power, governance, worldviews and values that have driven the climate crisis. In this talk Eriel Deranger and Jen Gobby will share their own visions for what this transformation can look like and open up a discussion about how these visions can inspire and ground the work of those in the tech and innovation world.
About the speakers
Eriel Tchekwie Deranger is a Dënesųłiné mother from the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation (ACFN) and the Executive Director and co-founder of Indigenous Climate Action (ICA), an Indigenous-led climate justice organization in so-called Canada. Deranger is a member of the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change, and sits on various boards including Bioneers, It Takes Roots Leadership Council, Climate Justice Resiliency Fund Council of Advisors, the UK Tar Sands Network and WWF Canada; and was a founding member of the Global Indigenous Youth Caucus.
Jen Gobby is a settler living on a small farm on unceded Abekani Territory in rural Quebec. She has a PhD from McGill and is Affiliate Assistant Professor at Concordia University. She is the author of More Powerful Together: Conversations with Climate Activists and Indigenous Land Defenders and founder of Research for the Front Lines, where she currently works, supporting the research needs of communities and movements fighting for climate and environmental justice across so-called Canada.
Critical Tech Talk 5 — Artificial Wombs: The Disobedient Future of Birth
Monday, March 13, 2023, 5:00 p.m. on Zoom | Watch the recording of Artificial Wombs
The fifth event in this series of honest talks about innovation presents Dr. Claire Horn, Killam postdoctoral research fellow from Dalhousie University. This event is co-presented by the Faculty of Health.
About the talk
Since 2017, researchers have made significant progress toward developing a liquid environment to mimic the conditions of the uterus and allow fetuses to gestate outside the body from as early as 21-23 weeks. Bioethical and liberal feminist commentators have anticipated that artificial wombs (ectogenesis) will benefit all pregnant people. Contemporary ectogenesis technologies, however, are costly projects intended for well-equipped emergency neonatal facilities. Introduced into a world where globalised and racialized inequity in neonatal and perinatal mortality and morbidity are pronounced, rather than proffering universal improvements to care, these technologies are likely to increase existing stratification. This talk explores how the design, implementation, and regulation of artificial wombs may shape the technology’s impact and considers how artificial wombs and reproductive technologies more broadly might be altered if they were disentangled from the spheres of both healthcare and the commercial market. Exploring how existing technologies (such as medication abortion and artificial insemination) have travelled within heavily regulated medical settings and through networks of home care, medical knowledge sharing, and mutual aid, I will consider the possible future paths an artificial womb might take.
Speakers
Dr. Claire Horn is a Killam postdoctoral research fellow at Dalhousie University’s Health Law Institute. She has previously held research fellowships with the Wellcome Trust and the Modern Law Review. Her work over the last six years has focused on law and policy governing sexual and reproductive health, rights, and technologies, with specific interest in ectogenesis. Her book, EVE: The Disobedient Future of Birth, is forthcoming in March 2023.
Dr. Horn’s talk will be followed by a conversation with two Waterloo researchers.
Alana Cattapan is the Canada Research Chair in the Politics of Reproduction, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Waterloo, and an Adjunct Professor at the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Saskatchewan. She is also the director of the Politics of Reproduction Research Group at the University of Waterloo. She studies gendered inclusion in policy making related to reproduction, identifying links between the state, the commercialization of the body, and reproductive labour.
Margaret Mutumba is a health innovator and public health researcher with over 10 years of experience in maternal, sexual & reproductive health in Sub-Saharan Africa. Margaret's recent work has focused on equitable access to fertility care in low-resource contexts, having overseen management of fertility hospitals in Uganda, Zambia, Tanzania, and Rwanda. Her doctoral research examines the accessibility and affordability of fertility care in Sub-Saharan Africa. Through this work, Margaret founded a digital health startup, MedAtlas, that makes it easier for patients anywhere in Africa to access specialist (fertility) care.
Moderator
Professor Marcel O'Gorman, University Research Chair, professor of English, and founding director of the Critical Media Lab (CML), University of Waterloo. Professor O'Gorman leads collaborative design projects and teaches courses and workshops on responsible innovation and critical design at the CML, which is located at the Communitech Hub.
Critical Tech Talk 4 – Shaping Technology with Moral Imagination: Leveraging the Machinery of Value Sensitive Design
Friday, Oct. 28, 2022, 4:00 p.m.
Watch the recording of Shaping Technology with Moral Imagination
The fourth event in this series of honest talks about innovation is co-presented with the Faculty of Environment and features Professor Batya Friedman from the University of Washington.
About the speaker and topic
Batya Friedman is a professor in the Information School and holds adjunct appointments in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, the School of Law, and the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington where she co-founded the Value Sensitive Design Lab and the UW Tech Policy Lab. About the talk, she writes:
Tools and technologies are fundamental to the human condition. They do no less than create and structure the conditions in which we live, express ourselves, enact society, and experience what it means to be human. They are also the result of our moral and technical imaginations. Yet, with our limited view, it is not at all obvious how to design and engineer tools and technology so that they are more likely to support the actions, relationships, institutions, and experiences that human beings care deeply about – a life and society of human flourishing.
Value Sensitive Design (VSD) was developed as an approach to address this challenge from within technical design processes. Drawing on over three decades of work, in this talk I will provide an introduction to value sensitive design foregrounding human values in the technical design process. My remarks will present some of value sensitive design’s core theoretical constructs. Along the way, I’ll provide some examples of applying value sensitive design to robots for healthcare and to bias in computing systems as well as demonstrate one toolkit—The Envisioning Cards—in the context of a design activity.
Student respondents
Carl Tutton is undertaking a PhD in Sustainability Management. His background in end-of-life electronic waste policy and management systems, material flow analysis, and long-time interests and hobbies in consumer electronics led to his interest in the beginning of the lifecycle of products, the design phase. His work seeks to analyze successful implementations of, and barriers to, sustainable design changes and more efficient product lifecycles.
Sid Heeg is a PhD student in Sustainability Management. Their research focuses on mis/disinformation surrounding farming and farm practices and how to bridge the knowledge gap between urban and rural populations. They are interested in learning how social media algorithms play a role in the continued spread of mis/disinformation and how it impacts sustainable farming practices.
Critical Tech Talk 3: AI Five Ways
Monday, May 16, 2022, 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. | Watch the recording of AI Five Ways
The third event in this series of honest talks about innovation features five experts from across domains and disciplines of artificial intelligence (AI).
As AI grows more prevalent every day, even to the point of making life-and-death decisions for humans, principles of Responsible AI must be implemented to ensure safety, dignity, privacy, and autonomy for all. In this roundtable discussion, hear from five experts across different professional and disciplinary backgrounds on their approaches to the field and perspectives on the future of responsible AI.
About the speakers
Hessie Jones is a Privacy Technologist, Venture Partner, Strategist, Tech Journalist and Author. She is currently a Venture Partner at MATR Ventures and COO, Beacon, a social enterprise start-up focusing on privacy solutions. She has 20 years of experience in start-up tech: data targeting, profile and behavioural analytics, AI tech and more recently data privacy and security.
Reza Bosagh Zadeh is founder and CEO at Matroid and an Adjunct Professor at Stanford. His work focuses on Machine Learning, Distributed Computing, and Discrete Applied Mathematics.
Kem-Laurin Lubin is a Ph.D. Candidate in English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo, where she focuses on AI models used in apps deployed in digital citizen management, specifically judiciary, healthcare, and education-based apps.
Patricia Thaine is a Computer Science PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto and a Postgraduate Affiliate at the Vector Institute doing research on privacy-preserving natural language processing, with a focus on applied cryptography.
Ben Armstrong is a Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo where he is affiliated with the Artificial Intelligence Group. His research combines machine learning and social choice.
Critical Tech Talk 2: Wendy Chun — Discriminating data
Thursday, February 10, 2022, 6 to 9 p.m. online in three parts
Watch the recording of Discriminating Data
Have you ever observed a divisive, rage-fuelled fight online and wondered about the role technology played in the background?
In her most recent book, Discriminating Data (2021), Wendy Chun reveals how polarization is a goal—not an error—within big data and machine learning. These methods, she argues, encode segregation, eugenics, and identity politics through their default assumptions and conditions. Correlation, which grounds big data's predictive potential, stems from twentieth-century eugenic attempts to “breed” a better future. Recommender systems foster angry clusters of sameness through homophily. Users are “trained” to become authentically predictable via a politics and technology of recognition. Machine learning and data analytics thus seek to disrupt the future by making disruption impossible.
6:00-7:00
p.m.
Data
Jam
In this pre-conversation event, co-organized with the qcollaborative, participants will engage in a group design activity inspired by Wendy Chun’s book, Discriminating Data. Limited space available.
7:00-8:00
p.m.
Discriminating
Data:
A
Conversation
with
Wendy
Chun
Participants include Marcel O’Gorman (moderator) with respondents Brie Wiens and Queenie Wu.
8:00-9:00
p.m.
2D
Social
Mixer
Join in Gather Town for the “Data Jam Showcase” and a surprise jam room.
About the speaker
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Simon Fraser University's Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication and Director of the Digital Democracies Institute. She studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature at the University of Waterloo, disciplines that combine and mutate in her work on digital media. Her recent books include Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition (2021), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (2016), and Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (2011).
Moderator
Professor Marcel O'Gorman, University Research Chair, professor of English, and founding director of the Critical Media Lab (CML), University of Waterloo. Professor O'Gorman leads collaborative design projects and teaches courses and workshops in the philosophy of technology at the CML, which is located at the Communitech Hub. The role of the CML is to disseminate a philosophy of "tech for good."
Respondents
Brianna I. Wiens (she/her) is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo and co-director of the qcollaborative, an intersectional feminist design lab. Her interdisciplinary work draws on her mixed-race queer activist-scholar experience to explore the digitally and culturally mediated phenomena of networked social movements and the politics of their design.
Queenie Wu (she/her) is a fourth-year undergraduate student studying Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo. Her experience in digital product design influences her curiosity regarding the impacts of data and research processes on social systems through various lenses - including data journalism and urban planning.
Critical Tech Talk 1: Nicole Aschoff – The digital frontier and its limits
Monday, November 8, 2021, 5 PM | Theatre of the Arts, University of Waterloo
Watch the recording of The Digital Frontier and its Limits
Silicon Valley companies have brought digital technology into every sphere of modern life. But while Big Tech garners unprecedented power and profits, everyday existence becomes ever more deeply enmeshed in the circuits of capital. To what end? What are the limits of the digital frontier?
About the speaker
Nicole Aschoff is an editor, writer and public sociologist focused on technology, labour, politics, feminism, the economy, and the environment. Her recent book is The Smartphone Society: Technology, Power, and Resistance in the New Gilded Age. She examines the complex ways that people, institutions, and big systems, intersect to forge the society we live in. Aschoff holds a PhD in sociology from Johns Hopkins University and currently works as a senior editor with Verso Books. Read more: nicoleaschoff.com
Moderator
Professor Marcel O'Gorman, University Research Chair, professor of English, and founding director of the Critical Media Lab (CML), University of Waterloo. Professor O'Gorman leads collaborative design projects and teaches courses and workshops in the philosophy of technology at the CML, which is located at the Communitech Hub. The role of the CML is to disseminate a philosophy of "tech for good."
Student respondents
Neha Revella (she/they), MA Experimental Digital Media, Department of English, University of Waterloo. Neha is currently working as a research and project manager at Mozilla.
Nolan Dey (he/him), BASc Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo. Nolan is currently working as an AI research scientist for Cerebras Systems.