The Need for Roots in a Digital Society | Catherine D’Ignazio

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On November 6, Boston University’s Center for Media Innovation & Social Impact hosts its second Annual Summit. The day-long event will feature speakers, workshops, and panel discussions across disciplines and between city, university, and community members to investigate the pressing issues related to attention, ecology, community, and trust.

MIT DUSP Professor Catherine D'Ignazio will be participating as a panelist during the following session on justice in the age of AI:

AI systems increasingly guide decisions that play out in local contexts: who gets flagged as a risk, whose neighborhood gets patrolled or invested in, whose voice counts in a dispute. The criminal justice system is one prominent example, but the pattern recurs across many domains where data built and trained far from a community ends up shaping outcomes within it. This panel explores what it means to build systems that are answerable to the communities most affected by them.

Panelists will consider what normative questions about fairness and accountability get decided, often invisibly, in technical design choices; and how local, community rooted approaches to justice can push back against technologies built at scale and at a distance. Ultimately, the question is: in the formal and informal spaces of public life, whose knowledge counts, and who gets to decide?

Moderated by Kannan Thiruvengadam. The panelists include:

Catherine D’Ignazio, MIT

J. Nathan Matias, Cornell University

Ngozi Okidegbe, Boston University