Faculty

Join the Critical Tech Talk series to hear guest speaker Kari Zacharias discuss how engineers can work towards responsibility, sustainability, and equity in design by practicing humility as respect of other ways of knowing, doing, being, and making.

Join us for an urgent discussion on "surveillance capitalism", its threat to our information civilization, and how its trajectory undermines democratic norms and the centuries-long evolution of market capitalism.

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.

Join via this Zoom link, passcode 756099.
 
BIO:
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.

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.

This is a hybrid event and may be attended in-person or online.

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.

We would like to warmly invite you to attend our student Showcase event for the multi-universityInterdisciplinary Engineering for Sustainability and Innovation (aka ‘How to Change the World’) course, running this term in partnership with the global social enterprise How to Change the World and ten faculties of engineering from across Canada.

In 2002, Ghyslain Raza made a fun video of himself playing a Star Wars character. Later the video was posted on the internet without his consent.
It became the first viral video, with enormous consequences for Raza.
In 2022, Raza broke his silence to speak about his experience and reflect on its meaning today.
Join us in E5 6004 @ 7pm on Feb. 15 to watch this documentary as Raza revisits "The Star Wars Kid."

Free admittance!  Free popcorn!