Book Talk | Hilke Schellmann | The Algorithm: How AI Decides Who Gets Hired, Monitored, Promoted, and Fired and Why We Need to Fight Back Now
Join the Institute for Public Knowledge, NYU Journalism, and the AI in Society Working Group on Wednesday, March 12th (5:30-7:00 PM) for a book talk with Hilke Schellmann. She will discuss her book The Algorithm: How AI Decides Who Gets Hired, Monitored, Promoted, and Fired and Why We Need to Fight Back Now with Ed Kang and Anna Skarpelis.
Hilke Schellmann is an Emmy award winning investigative reporter and journalism professor at NYU. Her work covering artificial intelligence has been published in The New York Times,The Guardian, the MIT Technology Review, and The Wall Street Journal, where she led a team investigating how AI is changing our lives. She has also reported for NPR’s Planet Money podcast on fake online reviews and her investigation for VICE on HBO was a finalist for a Peabody Award. Her PBS Frontline documentary Outlawed in Pakistan premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was honored with an Emmy award.
Edward B. Kang is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. He is currently writing a book (under contract, The MIT Press) that parses the scientific, cultural, and technical formats through which artificial intelligence, voice, and listening are fastened together. He is also the co-director of a multi-year project supported by the National Endowment of Humanities (NEH) titled Machine Listening in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Kang’s work sits at the intersection of Science & Technology Studies (STS) and Sound Studies, with a specific focus on the sociotechnical dimensions of AI/ML systems and the communities, cultures, and practices through which they are enacted. His research on these topics has been published in Big Data & Society, Social Studies of Science, Science, Technology & Human-Values, and the Proceedings for the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, among others.
Anna Skarpelis is Assistant Professor and Richard Lachmann Chair of Sociology at CUNY Queens College in New York. She is a cultural and comparative-historical sociologist utilizing qualitative and computational methods in her research on race, social classification, violence, and artificial intelligence. She is especially interested in questions of representation and classification, and has most recently been working on what happens to selfhood in an age of synthetic data and simulation. She received her Ph.D. from New York University and held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard University and the Social Science Center Berlin (WZB). Her work has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Qualitative Sociology, and other peer-reviewed venues; her book in progress is titled “Racial Vision: Failed Projects of Human Difference.” She is the recipient of the 2024 Roger V. Gould Prize.