Aparna Ashok
Emerging Tech, Product Design, Human Rights at Ethics SprintGlobally, digital infrastructure and automations are being incorporated into essential, everyday functions impacting billions of people. Aparna is on a mission to empower technologists so that as we design this infrastructure, it is primed to deliver equitable benefits and sidestep unintended, known harms.
A technology anthropologist, service designer and AI ethics researcher, Aparna approaches digital ethics from the human side of technology. She translates complex digital ethics challenges and makes them actionable with diverse audiences – be it an Ethics Sprint workshop for 120 technologists or consulting with public sector stakeholders at the UK Government. She co-created Fluxus Landscape – an expansive map of AI Ethics and Governance initiatives worldwide for Stanford University in 2019 – it debuted at the World Economic Forum’s first AI Global Council. She was named on the 100 Brilliant Women in AI ethics 2020 list by Lighthouse media and is an advisory group member for Wellcome Trusts’ Data Labs.
Talk
Designing Ethical Technology
Conversations about the ethics and safety of automated systems have abounded in recent months. Whose responsibility is it? Is regulation necessary for the industry to change? Which philosophical approach is the right one?
Moving forward from the philosophical debate, it is time to look at digital ethics in practice. Technologists hold a unique position of power in their influence over automated systems that will drive our collective future. When all is said and done and you are knee-deep in a product cycle, how do you apply ethics in your product design?
Ethics can be a competitive advantage and technologists can be the torchbearers for it. The objective is to take a proactive approach to risks and opportunities, and this can be done by evaluating your system design against human rights, social impact and the proposed EU AI regulation. Whether you are a researcher, analyst, data scientist or designer, this talk will provide you with a framework and explore the tools and templates you have at your disposal to build ethically aligned products.
Workshops
Humane considerations for automated systems
- November 24, 2021 at 10:00
- Tallinn University, Narva mnt 25, Tallinn, Estonia
This workshop is a deep dive into how ethical principles and human rights can be incorporated into the design of automated systems. We will kick off the workshop discussing the fundamental principles of Ethical technology and examining how these are applied in practice. Participants will be divided into teams and assigned a known product concept (eg. ride-sharing, delivery etc.) to identify a critical ethical use case that needs solving. In the last stage, the team will design a solution for the identified problem and present their solutions to the rest of the teams.
The workshop will happen on an online collaboration platform to accommodate in-person and remote participants. Through this workshop, you can expect to get familiar with the language that can be used to identify and bring humane or ethical concerns to your own teams, get a grasp on how “ethical issues” can be reframed as creative constraints and opportunities for product and how a business case for a solution can be pitched to relevant stakeholders.
Who is this for? Anyone who is interested in the overlap of digital products and ethics.
The workshop duration is 6 hours
*In case the speaker is not allowed to travel to Estonia, we will move the workshop to the online format.
280 €€
336€ with VAT
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