NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, the 370 Jay Project, and the NYU Tandon Department of Technology, Culture and Society invite you to a new discussion in the series “Co-Opting AI.”

This event will examine the sometimes fraught history of personality as a scientific concept vis-a-vis the implications of its more recent incarnation in automated hiring tools.

Ifeoma Ajunwa is an Associate Professor of Law with tenure at UNC School of Law. She is also the Founding Director of the AI Decision-Making Research Program. Professor Ajunwa has been Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law School since 2017. Her research interests include: Race & the Law, Law & Technology, Employment & Labor Law, Health Law, etc. She has a budding interest in law & literature. Professor Ajunwa’s work is published or forthcoming in high impact factor law reviews of general interest: the California Law Review, Cardozo Law Review, Fordham Law Review, and Northwestern Law Review, as well as, the top law journals for specialty areas such as: anti-discrimination law (Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review), employment and labor law (Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law), and law and technology (Harvard Journal of Law and Technology). She has published op-eds in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, etc., and her research has been featured in major media outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Guardian, the BBC, NPR, etc. In 2020, she testified before the U.S. Congressional Committee on Education and Labor, and has spoken before governmental agencies, such as, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (the CFPB), and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (the EEOC). In 2018, the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) awarded Professor Ajunwa the Derrick A. Bell Award in recognition of her scholarly and teaching efforts addressing racial discrimination. In 2019, the National Science Foundation (NSF) selected her NSF CAREER Award proposal on automated hiring for funding. And in 2020, She received a pioneer grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to research genetic testing as part of workplace wellness programs.

Merve Emre is associate professor of English at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), The Ferrante Letters (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), and The Personality Brokers (Doubleday: New York, 2018), which was selected as one of the best books of 2018 by the New York Times, the Economist, NPR, CBC, and the Spectator, and informs the CNN/HBO Max documentary feature film Persona. She is the editor of Once and Future Feminist (Cambridge: MIT, 2018), The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Liveright, 2021), and The Norton Modern Library Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Norton, 2021).  She is finishing a book titled Post-Discipline: Literature, Professionalism, and the Crisis of the Humanities (under contract with the University of Chicago Press) and writing a book called Love and Other Useless Pursuits (under contract with Doubleday US / Harper Collins UK).  She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Her essays and criticism have appeared in publications ranging from The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and the London Review of Books to American Literature, American Literary History, and Modernism/modernity. In 2019, she was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize. In 2021, she was awarded the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. Her work has been supported by the Whiting Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Leverhulme Trust, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Quebec, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, where she was a fellow from 2020-2021. In 2022, she is serving as one of the judges of the International Booker Prize.

Luke Stark is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University in London, ON. His work interrogating the historical, social, and ethical impacts of computing and AI technologies has appeared in journals including The Information Society, Social Studies of Science, and New Media & Society, and in popular venues like Slate, The Globe and Mail, and The Boston Globe. Luke was previously a Postdoctoral Researcher in AI ethics at Microsoft Research, and a Postdoctoral Fellow in Sociology at Dartmouth College; he holds a PhD from the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.

Mona Sloane is a sociologist working on design and inequality, specifically in the context of AI design and policy. She is a Senior Research Scientist at the NYU Center for Responsible AI, Faculty at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, a Fellow with NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge (IPK) and The GovLab, and the Director of the *This Is Not A Drill* program on technology, inequality and the climate emergency at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She is principal investigator on multiple research projects on AI and society, and holds an affiliation with the Tübingen AI Center at the University of Tübingen in Germany. Mona also is the convenor of the IPK Co-Opting AI series and serves as editor of the technology section at Public Books. Follow her on Twitter @mona_sloane.

The Co-Opting AI event series is convened by Mona Sloane. They are hosted at IPK and co-sponsored by the 370 Jay Project, and the NYU Tandon Department of Technology, Culture and Society.