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CRAI-CIS Seminar: Using AI bias to mitigate poverty

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Critical AI & Crisis Interrogatives (CRAI-CIS) Seminar

Monthly dialogues and critical perspectives on artificial intelligence, Human Computer Interaction (HCI), participatory design, and crisis-related research for societal impact.

The CRAI-CIS Seminars engage emerging work across critical AI, Human Computer Interaction (HCI), participatory design, and crisis-related research. The seminars seek to invoke dialogues on how computational, human-centred, and social sciences perspectives can offer new insights and methods for inclusive approaches and critical inquiry with societal impact.

Each event features invited speakers who share distinct perspectives, ongoing research, methods, and challenges for future work in a 45 minute talk, followed by Q&A and space for mingling and networking. The talks will be recorded for open access in the future.

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Georgina Curto: Using AI bias to mitigate poverty

Time: May 22, 2024, 16:00–17:30
Venue: Event is hybrid. Participants may attend in person (T2, Computer Science Building, Aalto University) or online on Zoom.

Abstract: 

Online bias can be useful in identifying and measuring shared beliefs that influence social policymaking. In this talk, she will outline promising research directions to inform alternative poverty mitigation strategies at a global level. It is an interdisciplinary perspective, incorporating AI-enabled tools, offering insights on new paths for poverty mitigation. For instance, by generating a global index of discrimination against the poor (using NLP techniques and LLMs), and research aiming to optimize poverty mitigation policies via AI simulations (using Agent-Based Modeling methods). 

Speaker Bio: 

Georgina is an Assistant Research Professor at the Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society, University of Notre Dame.  She chairs the IJCAI Symposia in the Global South and Co-Chair the AI & Social Good Special Track at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'23)

Focusing on issues of poverty mitigation, fairness and inclusion, she works on the design of AI socio-technical systems that provide new insights to counteract inequality, and more broadly, to advance interdisciplinary research towards the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). 

Georgina conducts research that contributes to the AI state of the art  in Natural Language Processing, Agent-Based Modeling, Social Networks and Machine Learning, with the ultimate goal to offer insights for innovative interventions to local and global challenges. Some of these lines of research were awarded Best AI for Good Project at the 31st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'22) and Outstanding Paper at the ACL (Association of Computational Linguistics) within the 7th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms

Georgina received her Ph.D. in the joint program offered by the universities Ramon Llull, Deusto and Comillas Pontifical University (Cum Laude) for a dissertation on "Artificial Intelligence and Inclusion: an analysis of bias against the poor", during which she was trained into the philosophy of economics, ethics and human development as well on the state of the art on AI. She has studied a Master's Degree in Economics Research from Universitat Ramon Llull and an International Executive M.B.A. (distinction with honors) from IE University Business School, where she was awarded for the Best Entrepreneurial Project. 

Previous to her current position at the University of Notre Dame, she worked as a Design Thinking lecturer at EINA (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), as an entrepreneurship consultant for the Barcelona City Council Local Development Agency and she directed her own entrepreneurial project.