

Digital Life Seminar
Date: 2023 Spring Semester
When: Due to limited space, all guests outside of Cornell Tech are asked to please RSVP beforehand. Contact: mjb556@cornell.edu
Convenors: Helen Nissenbaum and Michael Byrne
The Digital Life Seminar series offers students and guests an opportunity to engage actively with leading scholars and practitioners researching and responding to the development and application of digital technologies.
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DLI Seminars | Spring 2023

Armin Namavari
Cornell Tech
Governance for End-to-End Encrypted Communities
The increasing harms caused by hate, harassment, and other forms of abuse online have motivated major platforms to explore hierarchical governance. The idea is to allow communities to have designated members take on moderation and leadership duties; meanwhile, members can still escalate issues to the platform. But these promising approaches have only been explored in plaintext settings where community content is public to the platform. It is unclear how one can realize hierarchical governance in the huge and increasing number of online communities that utilize end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging for privacy.

Ero Balsa
Cornell Tech
The Risks of Privacy Risk Assessments
Ero Balsa is a postdoctoral research fellow at Cornell Tech's Digital Life Initiative. He is interested in how the designs of information systems impact society, mainly in terms of privacy and fairness, and in how to redesign or intervene these systems to address the problems they create. His work examines the design and analysis of privacy enhancing technologies and, in particular, technologies that enable users to contest asymmetries of power and knowledge, such as obfuscation tools and protective optimization technologies (POTs).

Smitha Milli
Cornell Tech
Experimentally Measuring Effects of Recommender Systems
Smitha Milli is a Postdoc at Cornell Tech, working with Nikhil Garg and Emma Pierson. Smitha received a BS and PhD in EECS from UC Berkeley where they were advised by Anca Dragan and Moritz Hardt. Their Postdoc is supported by the Open Philanthropy Project.

Sina Fazelpour
Northeastern University
Fairness in Sociotechnical Machine Learning Systems
Sina Fazelpour is an assistant professor of philosophy and computer science, holding joint appointments with the Khoury College of Computer Sciences and the College of Social Sciences and Humanities at Northeastern University. Fazelpour’s research focuses on issues of justice, diversity, and reliability in data-driven and artificial intelligence technologies. He also works on understanding the concepts and consequences of diversity in social groups and networks. To address these issues, he draws on analytical tools of philosophy, methods of cognitive science, and formal techniques of agent-based simulation and machine learning.
COVID-19 Operating Status | Due to space limitations caused by the ongoing pandemic, all guests outside of Cornell Tech are required to RSVP beforehand. Kindly contact Michael Byrne: mjb556@cornell.edu
Enrolled Cornell Tech Students | Please consult your Canvas course guide for more information on Spring 2023.
Previous Seminars
For more information about our past list of seminar speakers, see the DLI Seminar Archive >
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