Summer School – Towards Responsible Machine Learning

This part-time, five-day course offers foundational Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data science concepts that are applicable in the humanities and social sciences. Offered by SFU's Digital Democracies Institute and SFU’s Big Data Initiative, this course will have you examine best practices to critically evaluate and mitigate unwanted bias from sources such as data, algorithms […]

Nathan Schneider talks to the Institute

Online

The implicit feudalism of online communities An “implicit feudalism” informs the available options for community management on the dominant platforms for online communities. It is a pattern that grants user-administrators absolutist reign over their fiefdoms, with competition among them as the primary mechanism for quality control, typically under rules set by platform companies. Implicit feudalism […]

Aleena Chia presents to the Institute

Aleena Leng An Chia is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication specializing in the ethnography of gaming cultures. Her research investigates practices at the margins of the digital and analogue, and in the interstices between work and play. Her work examines gaming's boundary work as structuring categories in post-Fordism, as achievement systems in player communities, […]

Histories of AI: A Genealogy of Power

Online

Wendy gives a keynote at Histories of AI: A Genealogy of Power (A Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar) at Cambridge, part of the Summer School on the same topic. The University of Cambridge is hosting a Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Histories of AI: A Genealogy of Power from May 2020–April 2021. The Seminar is co-hosted by the Department […]

Caroline Colijn presents to the Lab

Online

Caroline’s work is at the interface of mathematics and the epidemiology and evolution of pathogens. She holds a Canada 150 Research Chair in Mathematics for Evolution, Infection and Public Health. In this group we develop mathematical tools connecting sequence data to the ecology and evolution of infections. She also has a long-standing interest on the dynamics […]

Tarleton Gillespie presents to the lab

Online

Prof. Gillespie's research focuses on the ongoing controversies surrounding digital media and commercial providers. His past work examined the move to technical solutions to copyright, their political and cultural implications, and how this move reveals underlying tensions between law, technology, and culture. His new research examines the implications of online media platforms as the new […]

Fenwick McKelvey presents to the lab

Online

Fenwick McKelvey studies algorithmic media – the intensification of software within communication infrastructure – through cases such as advanced Internet traffic management software and political campaign management software. His approach contributes to communication studies by demonstrating the opportunities to integrate software studies into the field while raising questions about the imbrication of software and communication. […]

Wendy Gives the 12th Annual Attallah Lecture at Carleton University

Online

Carleton University's School of Journalism and Communication invites you to the 12th annual Attallah Lecture, on Thursday, September 16th at 3:30pm PST. This year’s speaker is Dr. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University. Dr. Chun’s research draws from the humanities and social sciences to address questions […]

Giulio Dalla Riva presents to the lab

Online

"Prolegomena to Antifascist Data Science: theory, praxis, but mostly pizza." In this talk Giulio is going to try and sketch how it may be possible to do data science in a way that is rooted in antifascist thinking and practice. He will try to do that by reflecting upon two intense years of research and […]

Wendy gives President’s Lecture at SFU

In this President's Faculty Lecture, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (SFU's Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media) will discuss themes from her forthcoming book Discriminating Data about how big data and predictive machine learning currently encode discrimination and create agitated clusters of comforting rage (MIT Press). The lecture is free with registration, which you can sign up for here. This […]

Anti-Asian Sentiment Before Covid-19

Online

Join Grace Kyungwon Hong (UCLA), Lisa Nakamura (UMich) and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (SFU) for a discussion on anti-Asian sentiment before Covid-19. As many media accounts have recounted, Stop AAPI Hate reported that anti-Asian violence soared during the first wave of the 2020 COVID19 pandemic. From mid-March 2020 to the end of February 2021, 3,795 […]