Opening Keynote: Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist. He is a contributor to many magazines, websites and newspapers. He is a special consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards and treaties. He holds an honorary Doctor of Laws from York University (Toronto) and another honorary doctorate in computer science from the Open University (UK), where he is a Visiting Professor; he is also a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate and a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of North Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science. In 2007, he served as the Fulbright Chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. In 2022, he earned the Sir Arthur Clarke Imagination in Service to Society Award for lifetime achievement.
He is the author of many books, most recently RED TEAM BLUES, a science fiction crime thriller; CHOKEPOINT CAPITALISM (with Rebecca Giblin), nonfiction about monopoly and creative labor markets; and the LITTLE BROTHER series for young adults. His latest book is THE INTERNET CON (September 2023), a nonfiction book from Verso about monopoly and radical interoperability.
He co-founded the open source peer-to-peer software company OpenCola, and serves on the boards and advisory boards of the Participatory Culture Foundation, the Clarion Foundation, the Open Technology Fund and the Metabrainz Foundation. He maintains a daily blog at Pluralistic.net.
Closing Keynote: Rumman Chowdhury
Dr. Rumman Chowdhury is a pioneer in the field of applied algorithmic ethics, creating cutting-edge socio-technical solutions for ethical, explainable and transparent AI. She is an active contributor to discourse around responsible technology with bylines in the Atlantic, Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, MIT Technology Review and VentureBeat.
Dr. Chowdhury currently runs Parity Consulting, Parity Responsible Innovation Fund, and is a Responsible AI Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. She is also a Research Affiliate at the Minderoo Center for Democracy and Technology at Cambridge University and a visiting researcher at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering.
Previously, Dr. Chowdhury was the Director of META (ML Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability) team at Twitter, leading a team of applied researchers and engineers to identify and mitigate algorithmic harms on the platform. Prior to Twitter, she was CEO and founder of Parity, an enterprise algorithmic audit platform company. She formerly served as Global Lead for Responsible AI at Accenture Applied Intelligence. In her work as Accenture’s Responsible AI lead, she led the design of the Fairness Tool, a first-in-industry algorithmic tool to identify and mitigate bias in AI systems. She holds two undergraduate degrees from MIT, a master’s degree in Quantitative Methods of the Social Sciences from Columbia University, and a doctorate in political science from the University of California, San Diego.