Women Take On The Digital Divide

The bad old days of chauvinistic, stereotypical and exclusionary advertising was captured by the television series “Mad Men.” But today’s advertising is a high-tech, concentrated blast of “sticky” content that is designed to reel you in - and to find out everything about you. People in the tech industry use ad-blockers and virtual private networks for privacy, but what about the rest of us? This talk introduces the brave new world in which ad targeting and retargeting, loyalty programs and platforms like Instagram and Facebook, operate in a lawless “Wild West” where regulation is nonexistent and contextual data is the new gold rush.

Temi Lasade-Anderson is a data awareness and privacy advocate. After spending 5 years planning digital campaigns for major e-commerce and tech companies, she now uses her marketing and communications skills for privacy-focused tech companies such as Mozilla, as well as for nonprofit organizations working to ensure that marginalized people have greater access, inclusion and digital rights.

In Cooperation with Frauenloop

Bitcoin was launched as an antidote to the concentration of power and wealth on Wall Street. However, what started as a vision of “power to the people,” has become an industry that largely replicates the biases and exclusivity of the past.

What is the difference between elite investments and a currency market invented to encourage democratic, decentralized funds for all? The Gunda Werner Institute in the Heinrich Böll Foundation, in cooperation with FrauenLoop, invites you to hear from a  finance professional with a unique perspective on elite investments, and why it is crucial for everyone - especially women - to understand and participate in the world of crypto.

Anami Nguyen received a BSc in Finance & Management from NYU Stern. She worked as an analyst for J.P. Morgan. After that she helped build the finance operations and asset management practices for the Web3 Foundation. She is currently a Business Development Manager at NEUFUND, a blockchain supported financing and investment platform.

Computer vision has ceased to be a purely academic endeavor. From law enforcement, to border control, to employment, healthcare diagnostics, and assigning trust scores, computer vision systems are being rapidly integrated into all aspects of society.

Gender Shades showed that commercial gender classification systems have high disparities in error rates by skin-type and gender, and other works discuss the harms caused by the mere existence of automatic gender recognition systems. Recent papers have also exposed shockingly racist and sexist labels in popular computer vision datasets--resulting in the removal of some.

However, today, in research, there are works that purport to determine a person’s sexuality from their social network profile images, and others that claim to classify “violent individuals” from drone footage. A critical public discourse surrounding the use of computer-vision based technologies has been mounting. The use of facial recognition technologies by policing agencies has been heavily critiqued and, in response, companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM have pulled or paused their facial recognition software services.

In this talk, Dr. Timnit Gebru highlights some of the issues and proposed solutions to mitigate bias. She aso shows, how some of the proposed fixes could exacerbate the problem rather than mitigate it.