Finding Solutions: Choice, Control, and Content Policies

About the Event

In recent years, dilemmas posed by rapid technological innovation have become more complex and acute. Unless we actively manage their risks to society, new technologies may also bring unforeseen destructive consequences. Making technological change positive for all is the critical challenge of our time. We ourselves - not only the logic of discovery and market forces - must manage it. To create a future where technology serves humanity as a whole, we need a new approach. The Finding Solutions virtual series led by the Technology and Public Purpose Project convenes a multidisciplinary group of speakers to address the complex technology landscape and find potential solutions to mitigate technologies' harms. Karen Hao and Joaquin Candela will discuss finding solutions to the risks and harms posed by social media recommendation systems.

Speaker Bios

Moderator

Karen Hao is the senior AI editor at MIT Technology Review, covering the field’s cutting-edge research and its impacts on society. She writes a weekly newsletter called The Algorithm, which was named one of the best newsletters on the internet in 2018 by The Webby Awards, and co-produces the podcast In Machines We Trust, which won a 2020 Front Page Award.

In March of 2021, she published a nine-month investigation into Facebook’s Responsible AI efforts, and the company’s failure to prioritize studying and mitigating the way its algorithms amplify misinformation and extremism. Her findings were cited in a Congressional hearing on misinformation two weeks later. In December of 2020, she also published a piece that shed light into Google’s dismissal of its ethical AI co-lead Timnit Gebru, which Congressional members later cited in a missive to the company.

Prior to MIT Tech Review, she was a tech reporter and data scientist at Quartz. In a past life, she was also an application engineer at the first startup to spin out of Alphabet's X. She received her B.S. in mechanical engineering and minor in energy studies from MIT.

Speaker

Joaquin Quiñonero Candela is a Senior Fellow with the Harvard Belfer Center’s Technology and Public Purpose Project, with a mission to ensure that emerging technologies are developed and managed in ways that serve the public good. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the Partnership on AI, a non-profit partnership of academic, civil society, industry, and media organizations creating solutions so that AI advances positive outcomes for people and society, and is a member of the Spanish Government’s Advisory Council for Artificial Intelligence.

Until September 2021, Joaquin was the Distinguished Technical Lead for Responsible AI at Facebook, where he led the technical strategy for areas like fairness and inclusiveness, robustness, privacy, transparency, and accountability. Before this, he built and led the AML (Applied Machine Learning) team at Facebook, driving product impact at scale through applied research in machine learning, language understanding, computer vision, computational photography, augmented reality, and other AI disciplines. AML also built the unified AI platform that powers all production applications of AI across the family of Facebook products.

Prior to Facebook, he built and taught a new machine learning course at the University of Cambridge (in 2012, together with Carl Rasmussen), worked at Microsoft Research, and conducted postdoctoral research at three institutions in Germany, including the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. He received his PhD in 2004 from the Technical University of Denmark.

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