Activists Of Tech — The responsible tech podcast

Activists of Tech
Activists Of Tech — The responsible tech podcast

Shifting the narrative from Big Tech to Responsible Tech by sharing & archiving the work of change makers. At the intersection of technology and social justice, Activists Of Tech is a seasonal weekly podcast dedicated to the amplification and archival of minority voices among activists, thought leaders, academics, and practitioners of responsible tech. Shifting the narrative from Big Tech to responsible tech takes honesty: this is a "say it as it is" type of podcast, and no topic is too taboo not to be named and addressed. The topics covered encompass a variety of responsible tech areas and focus on social justice, AI harm, AI bias, AI regulation and advocacy, minorities in tech, gender equality, tech and democracy, social media, and algorithmic recommendations, to name a few. We also talk about solutions and how to make tech inclusive and beneficial for all.

  1. How existing safety mitigation safeguards fail in LLMs with Khaoula Chehbouni, PhD Researcher at McGill and MILA

    1 DAY AGO

    How existing safety mitigation safeguards fail in LLMs with Khaoula Chehbouni, PhD Researcher at McGill and MILA

    Large Language Models, or LLMs, may be the most popular type of AI systems, often seen as an alternative to search engines, even though they should not as the information they throw at users only resemble and mimic human speech and is not always factual, among many other issues that are talked about in this episode. Our guest today is Khaoula Chehbouni, she is a PhD Student in Computer Science at McGill University and Mila (Quebec AI Institute). Khaoula was awarded the prestigious FRQNT Doctoral Training Scholarship to research fairness and safety in large language models. She previously worked as a Senior Data Scientist at Statistics Canada and completed her Masters in Business Intelligence at HEC Montreal, where she received the Best Master Thesis award. In this episode, we talked about the impact of Western narratives on which LLMs are trained, the limits of trust and safety, how racism and stereotypes are mirrored and amplified by LLMs, and what it is like to be a minority in a STEM academic environment. I hope you’ll enjoy this episode.

    37 min
  2. Privacy under attack: how the Tor Project fights digital surveillance, with Raya Sharbain & Pavel Zoneff

    JAN 10

    Privacy under attack: how the Tor Project fights digital surveillance, with Raya Sharbain & Pavel Zoneff

    We’re all very used to being surveilled by now, especially through surveillance capitalism, or the commodification of our personal data - our age, location, mental state, shopping habits, tax bracket, are collected through various apps and websites and sold to thousands of third parties. On top of that, governments surveil their citizens, and it does not only happen in authoritarian States such as Russia, it also happens in the United States as well, where activists are watched by authorities during and after lawful protests. Looking at how pervasive tech enabled surveillance is, once you’re aware, it feels like living in a dystopia. Who needs to read Orwell’s 1984 when you can just look into civil society’s reports on mass surveillance or read the news? What we need are anti-surveillance alternatives, such as a search engine that, unlike Google, does not track you or any of your personal data, let alone sell them to whoever is willing to pay, and that addresses censorship, government firewalls, and empower users to access the open web. The good news is that it exists, and it’s called Tor: a web browser that protects users' privacy and anonymity by hiding their IP addresses and browsing activity by sending web traffic through a series of routers, called nodes, to anonymize it. The traffic is encrypted three times as it passes through the Tor network, a process conceptualized by the idea of "onion routing" that began in the 90s. The goal was to use the internet with as much privacy as possible, relying on a decentralized network. Today, the Tor Browser has become the world's strongest tool for privacy and freedom online. I had the pleasure to welcome not one, but two guests today from the Tor Project: Raya Sharbain is an Education Coordinator with the Tor Project, where she facilitates training for journalists and human rights defenders on Tor and Tails the anonymous operating system, and also develops and updates educational curricula on the Tor ecosystem, focusing on its use in circumventing network censorship and surveillance. Raya is a part-time Research Fellow with the Citizen Lab, focusing on targeted surveillance. Pavel Zoneff, with over a decade of experience working for some of the world’s leading tech brands, Pavel joined the Tor Project in 2023. As Director of Strategic Communications he supports the organization’s global outreach and advocacy efforts to champion unrestricted access to the open web and encrypted technologies.

    34 min

  3. 12/17/2024

    Queer Arab History, social media, and representation with Marwan Kaabour from Takweer

    Queer Arabs are often portrayed as either hated by their own Arab community or as Western imports as if Queerness came along with colonialism. And online, queer voices are mostly from western countries and don’t represent Queer Arabs. However, Marwan Kaabour is challenging these narratives by researching, digitally archiving, and celebrating Queer History in the Middle East from centuries ago to the present day. Takweer, the Instagram page that Marwan started 5 years ago to take ownership of his own story as a Queer Arab, quickly turned into a space of inclusion and discussion and went viral.Marwan is a Lebanese artist, designer, and the founder of Takweer. He was born and raised in Beirut before moving to London in 2011. From the Takweer project was born a book, The Queer Arab Glossary which is the first published collection of queer Arabic slang and was published this year in 2024. This episode is at the intersection of social media, digital archives, queer History, Arab culture, and languages and I hope you’ll enjoy it. Takweer page: https://www.instagram.com/takweer_/ Book: https://saqibooks.com/books/saqi/the-queer-arab-glossary/

    28 min
  4. History of tech, power relations, & archiving for social justice with Dr Jeffrey Yost from the Charles Babbage Institute

    12/03/2024

    History of tech, power relations, & archiving for social justice with Dr Jeffrey Yost from the Charles Babbage Institute

    Technology narratives are set in the present, and all of their promises set in the near future. We’ve heard about flying cars, automated jobs, robots able to annihilate Humanity, robots able to save Humanity, and went through many hype cycles, like crypto – a time that I personally tend to block from my memory. But looking at the past, at the evolution of technology, is actually critical for its impacts to be relevant and beneficial for everyone. We often say that History keeps repeating itself, so if we want to predict the future of technology, why not look at its past? Beyond that, I wondered how the History of Technology related to social justice and how interdisciplinary studies could advance social justice, as well as how to choose who and what to archive when it comes to Tech History, and how much AI could be useful or harmful in this endeavour. To answer these questions and more, I had the pleasure to welcome Dr Jeffrey Yost who studies power imbalances & societal inequality in our digital world. Dr Yost is a historian of science, technology, and medicine focused on the social, political, and cultural and intellectual history of the digital world. He is the Director of the Charles Babbage Institute (CBI) for Computing, Information & Culture, a computing and software studies research institute and the leading and most diverse historical archives center for students and scholars to study digital tech & its contexts. Created, hosted and produced by Mélissa M'Raidi-Kechichian.

    42 min
  5. Rethinking AI through Indigenous culture with Dane Malenfant from McGill University & MILA

    11/26/2024

    Rethinking AI through Indigenous culture with Dane Malenfant from McGill University & MILA

    An interesting thing about AI systems is that without a deliberately designed structure to promote the concept of sharing, AI systems will focus solely on maximizing their individual rewards, even if this prevents them from successfully completing a task. This is fascinating, and Dane Malenfant is working on the long term credit assignment problem at MILA and McGill University, and researching solutions through an indigenous lens. Dane is a citizen of Métis Nation- Saskatchewan and originally from the traditional Métis Homeland of North Battleford (Treaty 6) and of Regina (Treaty 4). He advocates for Indigenous representation in STEM and offers a unique perspective in doing so. In this episode, we explored the role of Indigenous cultural values, like reciprocity, in reshaping AI development – and how diverse perspectives can address both technical and societal challenges. Dane also talked about the importance of having diverse voices in AI and about the systemic barriers that indigenous people face that prevent them from being part of the field of AI, and how we can change it. Created, hosted and produced by Mélissa M'Raidi-Kechichian.

    32 min
  6. Online education, AI Ethics, & a vision for global learning with Kadian Davis-Owusu from TeachSomebody

    11/19/2024

    Online education, AI Ethics, & a vision for global learning with Kadian Davis-Owusu from TeachSomebody

    More often than not, on Activists of Tech, we talk about the problems caused by technology and the solutions or alternatives to these issues. And I kind of feel guilty because I don’t want to convey the idea that AI is inherently bad. Though the mainstream culture surrounding AI certainly is, we have agency over what we create, over the AI systems we design and on how they impact others. Today’s guest is a great example and she is nothing short of inspiring: Dr Kadian Davis-Owusu has turned her passion for technology and learning into purpose, advocating for the power of online education and the ethical use of AI in learning. Kadian is the co-founder of TeachSomebody and a university lecturer at the Fontys University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. This episode is about tackling educational inequalities with technology, and we dived into Kadian’s work as an educator and technologist at TeachSomebody, a platform on a mission to bridge educational divides by making education accessible and providing equal opportunities to underserved communities. We talked about how online courses can address global inequalities, the potential of AI to revolutionize learning access, and what it takes to tackle concerns about privacy and AI ethics, and much more. Created, hosted and produced by Mélissa M'Raidi-Kechichian.

    35 min
  7. Hope & imagining a better world with B Cavello from the Aspen Institute

    11/12/2024

    Hope & imagining a better world with B Cavello from the Aspen Institute

    This episode was initially scheduled to be released in mid-December, but it was actually recorded last week, specifically one day after the American elections took place and after Trump was re-elected. B and I briefly talked about the elections in this episode, but I decided to edit and release earlier because B radically tries to move us forward and their dedication and energy made me feel so much better and hopefully this episode will make you feel better as well. In this episode, B Cavello, Director of emerging technologies at the @ Aspen Institute and I talked about responsible tech, what it looks like, what limits the design and development of ethical artificial intelligence, but also about the importance of media and tech literacy, and bringing diverse voices to the tech conversation. Created, hosted and produced by Mélissa M'Raidi-Kechichian.

    35 min
  8. Expanding access to art using technology with Colin Clark

    11/05/2024

    Expanding access to art using technology with Colin Clark

    Culture, the arts, or what makes humans.. Humans. Yet it is not accessible to just everyone. When you think about it, how do you make a play accessible to visually or hearing impaired people? How can we use technology to translate art into senses they were not designed for in the first place? How does tech and art relate to disability justice? More often than not, people with disabilities are not included in the design process of artistic spaces that are not accessible and don’t accommodate bodies differing from the norm. In this episode, Colin Clark, inclusive designer and creative technologist and co-Founder of Lichen Community Systems Worker Cooperative Canada and Data Communities for Inclusion Solution Network at CIFAR joined me to talk about making the art world accessible with technology, the power of community led design, and move toward another yet related topic: the use of chat gpt by artists and the labor exploitation of the creative sector, and more! Created, hosted and produced by Mélissa M'Raidi-Kechichian.

    56 min
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Shifting the narrative from Big Tech to Responsible Tech by sharing & archiving the work of change makers. At the intersection of technology and social justice, Activists Of Tech is a seasonal weekly podcast dedicated to the amplification and archival of minority voices among activists, thought leaders, academics, and practitioners of responsible tech. Shifting the narrative from Big Tech to responsible tech takes honesty: this is a "say it as it is" type of podcast, and no topic is too taboo not to be named and addressed. The topics covered encompass a variety of responsible tech areas and focus on social justice, AI harm, AI bias, AI regulation and advocacy, minorities in tech, gender equality, tech and democracy, social media, and algorithmic recommendations, to name a few. We also talk about solutions and how to make tech inclusive and beneficial for all.

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