[Air-L] LIVE STREAM This Friday, 12pm EDT: "Apparatuses of recognition: Google, Project Maven, and targeted killing" with Lucy Suchman

[Christian Sandvig]

Hello AoIR:

We are launching a new research center soon called ESC: The Center for
Ethics, Society, and Computing.  We are in a "soft opening" phase right now
and this Friday we will do our first ESC experiment with a more
external-facing event. ESC will be live-streaming Lucy Suchman's talk on
image recognition technology and drone warfare. Prof. Suchman will discuss
the controversial Pentagon program that led to protests and resignations at
Google.

Her bio below is too modest: Prof. Suchman is very well-known as an expert
on human-computer interaction, is famous for her early work at Xerox PARC,
and was recently president of 4S.

I wanted to flag this for your attention in case you are interested in
watching. Of course you are also invited to forward this announcement as
appropriate.

Christian

--
http://umich.edu/~csandvig/


-----------------------------------------

TITLE
Apparatuses of recognition: Google, Project Maven, and targeted killing

SPEAKER
Lucy Suchman

DATE, TIME, AND LOCATION
Friday, April 19, 2019; 12pm-1pm Eastern Daylight Time (UTC/GMT-4)
Light lunch will be served
Ehrlicher Room, 3100 North Quad, 105 S. State St., Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285
Directions to this room: http://bit.ly/Ehrlicher (follow path #2)
Free and open to the public, no RSVP is required.

FOR REMOTE PARTICIPANTS
VIDEO FROM THIS TALK WILL BE STREAMED LIVE
For video, during the event visit this URL: http://umsi.info/suchman

ABSTRACT
In June of 2018, following a campaign initiated by activist employees
within the company, Google announced its intention not to renew a US
Defense Department contract for Project Maven, an initiative to automate
the identification of military targets based on drone video footage.
Defendants of the program argued that that it would increase the efficiency
and effectiveness of US drone operations, not least by enabling more
accurate recognition of those who are the program’s legitimate targets and,
by implication, sparing the lives of noncombatants. But this promise begs a
more fundamental question: What relations of reciprocal familiarity does
recognition presuppose? And in the absence of those relations, what schemas
of categorization inform our readings of the Other?

The focus of a growing body of scholarship, this question haunts not only
US military operations but an expanding array of technologies of social
sorting. Understood as apparatuses of recognition (Barad 2007: 171),
Project Maven and the US program of targeted killing are implicated in
perpetuating the very architectures of enmity that they take as their
necessitating conditions. I close with some thoughts on how we might
interrupt the workings of these apparatuses, in the service of wider
movements for social justice.

SPEAKER BIO
Lucy Suchman is Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology at
Lancaster University in the UK. Her research interests within the field of
feminist science and technology studies are focused on technological
imaginaries and material practices of technology design, particularly
developments at the interface of bodies and machines. Dr. Suchman’s current
research extends her longstanding critical engagement with the field of
human-computer interaction to contemporary warfighting, including the
figurations that inform immersive simulations, and problems of “situational
awareness” in remotely-controlled weapon systems. Dr. Suchman is concerned
with the question of whose bodies are incorporated into these systems, how
and with what consequences for social justice and the possibility for a
less violent world.

--

This talk and the speaker series listed below are part of the "soft
opening" of ESC: The Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing.
http://esc.umich.edu/

This event is generously supported by the School of Information; the Center
for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research; and the
Department of Communication Studies in the College of Literature, Science,
and the Arts at the University of Michigan.

Event details on the Web:
http://esc.umich.edu/event/critical-x-design-lucy-suchman/
A PDF flyer for this series:
http://esc.umich.edu/ESC_Events_Flyer_Fall_2019.pdf

________________________________

All events in this series:


CRITICAL x DESIGN: A new event series about ethics, society, and computing

Mar 20 (Wed) 3-4pm, 3100 North Quad, snacks provided

Katherine Behar: Digitally Divided: The Art of Algorithmic (In)Decision

Mar 27 (Wed) 12-1pm, 3100 North Quad, light lunch provided

Ben Grosser: Less Metrics, More Rando: (Net) Art as Software Research

Apr 11 (Thu) 12-1pm, 3100 North Quad, light lunch provided

Joy Rankin: Old, Raw, or New: A (New?) Deal for the Digital Age


Apr 19 (Fri) 12-1pm, 3100 North Quad, light lunch provided

Lucy Suchman: Apparatuses of Recognition: Google, Project Maven, and
Targeted Killing (*) (†)

________________________________

*The Ethics and Politics of AI: A Week of Events*

Apr 19 (Fri) 12-1pm, 3100 North Quad, light lunch provided
Lucy Suchman: *Apparatuses of Recognition: Google, Project Maven, and
Targeted Killing* (*) (†)

Apr 22 (Mon) 3-4pm, 3100 North Quad, snacks provided
Anna Lauren Hoffmann: *Data Violence: Discourse and Justice in a Datafied
World*

Apr 25 (Thu) 12-1pm, 3100 North Quad, light lunch provided
Tarleton Gillespie: *Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content
Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media* (*)

________________________________


(*) -- This event will be live streamed.

(†) -- This event is in *both* the "CRITICAL x DESIGN" and "The Ethics and
Politics of AI" event series.


All talks will be recorded, pending speaker approval.

*All talks will be held in the Ehrlicher Room, 3100 North Quad*, 105 S.
State St., Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285
Directions to this room: http://bit.ly/Ehrlicher (follow path #2)
Free and open to the public, no RSVP is required.

These events are generously supported by the School of Information; the
Center for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research; and the
Department of Communication Studies in the College of Literature, Science,
and the Arts at the University of Michigan.