September 17, 2021

Friday Night AI:

“Racial Disparities in Legal Enforcement: The promises (and perils) of AI?“
Free and open to the public

Join us for a live webinar

Invited speakers: Prof. Nicholas Camp and Prof. David Jurgens
Organizer: Michigan AI Lab, in collaboration with the Ann Arbor District Library
Moderator: Prof. Rada Mihalcea
When: September 17, at 7:00 pm
Where: Zoom webinar with live streaming on the AADL YouTube channel

A year into America’s “racial reckoning”, and seven years into the Black Lives Matter movement, the national conversation has brought renewed attention to the relationship between law enforcement and the communities they serve. Join us for an evening of discussing research on how we are building AI systems to highlight and reduce racial disparities in policing communication. At the same time, another conversation is taking place: can Artificial Intelligence be used to expose and combat racial disparities in the justice system, or will it simply reinforce existing biases? Our speakers will discuss the uses and misuses of AI in policing, and highlight areas where big data can be a tool to combat inequality in the criminal justice system. This conversation will speak to the challenges at the intersection of technology, equity, and racial justice.

Sample Questions:
> How has AI been applied to reducing racial disparities?
> What are the challenges to working with police and police-related data?
> Why do we need AI to tell us about racial disparities in policing when we could just listen to the people experiencing it?

About the speakers:

Nicholas Camp is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Studies at the University of Michigan where he studies the social psychology of racial inequality. His main program of research examines the role routine police-citizen encounters play in undermining police-community trust, and how these disparities can be addressed, combining analyses of officer-worn body camera footage with community surveys.

David Jurgens is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. His recent work focuses on developing language processing methods to understand the social dimensions of language, particularly those around issues of respect, intimacy, and empathy.

No registration is required. Check this webpage 15 minutes before the event for the Zoom link and phone number.

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