Date/Time
08/21/2023
11:00 am-12:00 pm
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Details
Social and Ethical Implications of AI – Experience from the Field and Visions for the Future
Monday, August 21, 2023, at 11:00am
Location: In-Person NEB, Room 100
Sonja Schmer-Galunder
Social Anthropologist and Principal Research Scientist
Smart Information Flow Technologies
Abstract
In this talk I will show examples from my past work and outline ideas for a curriculum for practitioners. I’ll give a brief overview of my past research at the intersection of social science and AI, with a focus on building theory-informed sociotechnical systems, including the use of NLP to quantify bias in data, tools for eliciting prosocial behaviors to counter polarization and misinformation and how to combine social theory with generative models to understand cultures at scale. I will then propose AI Ethics research topics and discuss benefits, harms and risks to society.
Biography
Sonja Schmer-Galunder is a Social Anthropologist and Principal Research Scientist at Smart Information Flow Technologies. She has more than 14 years of experience in human domain research, in particular working at the intersection of social science and AI. She is the Principal Investigator on several multi-million-dollar DARPA-funded research projects that combine social science with AI development to better address long-term social and cultural impacts of AI.
She was the PI of DARPA Understanding Group Bias, DARPA SBIRs TYBALT and MEDULLA OBLONGATA and she is currently PI on DARPA Civil Sanctuary and co-PI on DARPA HABITUS. Her research interests span social and ethical impact of AI, algorithmic bias, mis- and disinformation, the relationship between online discourse and offline behavior, anthropological methods for ML, and human performance. She also led several lunar surface operation simulation studies at the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) habitat and has been invited to present her research at academic conferences, NASA, Google and DARPA. Prior to working in industry, she worked as a researcher at Columbia University and New York University.