Join us in exploring the intersections and impact of AI, Health, and Gender!
The Pulse of Ethical Machine Learning in Health (Dr. Marzyeh Ghassemi )
Machine learning in health has made impressive progress in recent years, powered by an increasing availability of health-related data and high-capacity models. While many models in health now perform at or above humans in a range of tasks across the human lifespan, models also learn societal biases and may replicate or expand them. In this talk, Dr. Marzyeh Ghassemi will focus on the need for machine learning researchers and model developers to create robust models that can be ethically deployed in health settings, and beyond. Dr. Ghassemi's talk will span issues in data collection, outcome definition, algorithm development, and deployment considerations.
AI and Human Rights in Technofascist Times (Prof. Catherine D’Ignazio)
Drawing on her recent book, Counting Feminicide (MIT Press, 2024), D'Ignazio will contextualize the rise of "technofascism" – the collusion of large technology firms with authoritarian and anti-democratic political agendas – as well as describe several cases of AI, data and technology in the service of human rights, gender equality and multiracial democracy.
For questions about the event and accessibility, please contact wgs@mit.edu
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Dr. Marzyeh Ghassemi is an Associate Professor at MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Institute for Medical Engineering & Science (IMES), and a Vector Institute faculty member holding a Canadian CIFAR AI Chair and Canada Research Chair. She holds MIT affiliations with the Jameel Clinic and CSAIL.
Professor Ghassemi holds a Herman L. F. von Helmholtz Career Development Professorship, and was named a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar and one of MIT Tech Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35. Previously, she was a Visiting Researcher with Alphabet’s Verily and an Assistant Professor at University of Toronto. Prior to her PhD in Computer Science at MIT, she received an MSc. degree in biomedical engineering from Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar, and B.S. degrees in computer science and electrical engineering as a Goldwater Scholar at New Mexico State University.
Professor Ghassemi has previously served as a NeurIPS Workshop Co-Chair and General Chair for the ACM Conference on Health, Inference and Learning (CHIL). She also founded the non-profit Association for Health Learning and Inference. Professor Ghassemi has published across computer science and clinical venues, including NeurIPS, KDD, AAAI, MLHC, JAMIA, JMIR, JMLR, AMIA-CRI, Nature Medicine, Nature Translational Psychiatry, and Critical Care. Her work has been featured in popular press such as Fortune, MIT News, NVIDIA, and The Huffington Post.
Dr. Marzyeh Ghassemi focuses on creating and applying machine learning to understand and improve health in ways that are robust, private and fair. Dr. Ghassemi will talk about her work trying to train models that do not learn biased rules or recommendations that harm minorities or minoritized populations. The Healthy ML group tackles the many novel technical opportunities for machine learning in health, and works to make important progress with careful application to this domain.
Catherine D'Ignazio is an Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. She is also Director of the Data + Feminism Lab which uses data and computational methods to work towards gender and racial justice, particularly as they relate to space and place. D'Ignazio is a scholar, artist/designer and hacker mama who focuses on feminist technology, data literacy and civic engagement. She has run reproductive justice hackathons (like the Make the Breast Pump Not Suck Hackathon), designed global news recommendation systems, created talking and tweeting water quality sculptures, and led walking data visualizations to envision the future of sea level rise. With Rahul Bhargava, she built the platform Databasic.io, a suite of tools and activities to introduce newcomers to data science. Her 2020 book from MIT Press, Data Feminism, co-authored with Lauren Klein, charts a course for more ethical and empowering data science practices. D'Ignazio's second book, Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action (MIT Press 2024), highlights how mainstream data science can learn a lot from the care and memory work of grassroots feminist activists across the Americas. Her research at the intersection of technology, design & social justice has been published in FAccT, the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, Big Data & Society, and the proceedings of Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM SIGCHI). Her art and design projects have won awards from the Tanne Foundation, Turbulence.org and the Knight Foundation and exhibited at the Venice Biennial and the ICA Boston.
Prior to joining DUSP, D'Ignazio was an Assistant Professor of Data Visualization and Civic Media at Emerson College in the Journalism Department, taught for seven years in the Digital + Media graduate program at Rhode Island School of Design and did freelance software development for more than ten years. She holds an MS from the MIT Media Lab, an MFA from Maine College of Art, and a BA in International Relations (Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa) from Tufts University. D'Ignazio speaks English, Spanish and French and has lived in Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Paris and Catalunya. She is a co-founder of the globally unknown spatial justice collective the Institute for Infinitely Small Things. D'Ignazio is a proud board member of Indigenous Women Rising, an organization committed to honoring Native & Indigenous People’s inherent right to equitable and culturally safe health options through accessible health education, resources and advocacy.