AI and Digital Inequities Summit
Wednesday 27 September 2023
14:00 – 17:00 CEST
Online
Co-organisers: Centre for Sociodigital Futures (CenSoF)
The implications of generative artificial intelligence (AI) for education are rapidly evolving. In mid-2023, a trial aiming to integrate AI into textbooks has been announced in South Korea, while bans on ChatGPT were introduced in schools in Italy and New York. Digital knowledge, culture and software movements are exploring the role that ‘frontier’ technologies might play in opening up and democratising knowledge and education. At the same time, international organisations and scholars have expressed concerns about how AI may intensify the potential for digitalisation to reinforce and retrench existing inequalities at global and local levels. The dynamic implications of generative AI for education remain understudied, and research and policy funding environments remain skewed towards the interests of funders and tech companies overwhelmingly located in the Global North.
Co-organised by NORRAG and the Centre for Sociodigital Futures (CenSoF), the NORRAG AI and Digital Inequities Summit brings together perspectives from research and practice to ask what an ethical and justice-oriented response to AI in education might look like. Aimed at researchers, students, educators and education policy makers, the online Summit examines how generative AI, and the large language models (LLMs) that underpin them, can be understood within a contested landscape of digital technologies structured by inequities, biases, and potential and actual harms for minoritised and global majority people. Following an opening keynote, two multidisciplinary panels will explore issues of justice and knowledge and ethics, linking research and policy debates on generative AI to a global perspective on digital inequities. Each panel will address and engage in a public discussion of ideas for how we can redress digital knowledge inequities in generative AI.
Programme
Detailed agenda to come
14:00 – 14:50 – Keynote by Ben Williamson, Chancellor’s Fellow at the Centre for Research in Digital Education and the Edinburgh Futures Institute, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
15:00 – 15:50 – Panel 1: Justice, Knowledge and AI
- Professor Alejandro Artopoulos, Universidad de San Andrés
- Dr. Harini Suresh, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
- Dr. Lulu P. Shi, Oxford University
- Moderated by: Dr. Radhika Gorur, Deakin University
16:00 – 17:00 – Panel 2: Ethics and AI
- Raïssa Malu, Investing In People non-profit association
- Professor Emma Ruttkamp-Bloem, University of Pretoria
- Dr. Janja Komljenovic, Lancaster University
Partner:
Centre for Sociodigital Futures – Website
The Centre for Sociodigital Futures is an international centre of excellence for sociodigital futures research and collaboration. It will run for an initial five years from 2022 to 2027. It brings together world leading expertise from across the Social Sciences, Engineering and the Arts, and is led by the University of Bristol in collaboration with a growing number of renowned universities, strategic partners from both industry and policy, and a network of leading global universities