Cardiovascular division faculty members Karen Joynt Maddox (co-Director, Center for Health Economics & Policy) and Gmerice Hammond (Associate Director, Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity) along with their colleagues at the Institute of Public Health will be hosting a seminar October 19th entitield Algorithms of Oppression, presented by Dr. Safiya U. Noble.
Dr. Safiya U. Noble is an internet studies scholar and professor of gender studies and African American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where she serves as the Co-Founder and Faculty Director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry. She holds affiliations in the School of Education & Information Studies, and is a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford where she is a Commissioner on the Oxford Commission on AI & Good Governance. In 2021, she was recognized as a MacArthur Foundation Fellow (also known as the “Genius Award”) for her ground-breaking work on algorithmic discrimination. In 2022, she was recognized as the inaugural NAACP-Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award recipient.
In her latest book, “Algorithms of Oppression,” Safiya U. Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.