Presenting a paper next week on “Speech Portraits and the Audio/Visual Self” at a conference at Goldsmith’s. Here is the programme in PDF with full abstracts. From the CFP: We’re drowning in an ocean of data, or so the saying goes. Data’s “big”: there’s not only lots of it, but its volume has allowed for the development of new, large-scale processing techniques. Our relationship with governments, medical organisations, technology companies, the education sector, and so on are increasingly informed by the data we overtly or inadvertently provide when we use particular services. The proverbial data deluge is large-scale—but it’s also personal. Data promises to personalise services to better meet our individual needs. Data is often construed as a threat to our person(s). Not every person predicated by data is predicted the same. The intersection between data and person isn’t fixed: it has to be figured. This conference brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers to explore how the person—or persons, plural—are figured in/out of data. Figuration might encompass any or all of processes of representation, calculation, analogisation, …

This week, I participated in a day-long workshop at Concordia, organized by the Machines Agencies working group, to think about what an AI commons might look like. Here are is an excerpt from the original call: How can artificial intelligence be oriented toward the common good? The belief in AI for good has widespread acceptance in the industry and among governments. Declarations from around the globe—Canada, China, South Korea, France, and more—call for the development of AI to have a social purpose. But what is that purpose? … This workshop seeks to develop a commons-based vision for the future of AI as an intervention to understand transformations in citizen engagement as part of a larger research project to explore practices of citizenship in a skeptical world. The afternoon had a really interesting format: we separated into groups to write positions statements to the following pre-determined questions: What should an AI Commons be? How could the development of AI today—including the infrastructure and knowledge at its foundation—become a commons? Could AI reshape how we think about …