About the Talk:
This session aims to connect a diverse group of professionals from various fields where AI and related technologies are increasingly applied. The event will begin with an introduction by Pratik Sachdeva and Tom Van Nuenen from UC Berkeley’s Data Science for Social Justice, before the 1:1 networking session. The session is designed to encourage collaboration and the exchange of best practices relevant to participants' professional interests. Attendees will engage in multiple networking rounds, allowing them to connect with and share ideas with other members. Discussions will cover topics such as specific applications, tools, techniques, and more. This format promotes meaningful conversations and strengthens our community's collaborative spirit by fostering new professional connections.
About the Speakers:
Tom is a researcher and educator in Digital Humanities. He applies mixed methods to tackle social, ethical, and developmental questions in machine learning and algorithmic culture.
Currently, he works as a Lecturer, Data Scientist, and Senior Consultant at UC Berkeley's D-Lab. He leads the curriculum design for D-Lab’s data science workshop portfolio, as well as the Digital Humanities Summer Program at Berkeley.
His former research projects include a Research Associate position in the ‘Discovering and Attesting Digital Discrimination’ project at King’s College London (2019-2022) and a researcher-in-residence role for the UK’s National Research Centre on Privacy, Harm Reduction, and Adversarial Influence Online (2022). Tom's research uses Natural Language Processing methods to investigate norms and biases in language models. He is also interested in public perceptions of unfair treatment by AI systems.
Tom earned his Ph.D. in the Digital Humanities from Tilburg University in the Netherlands (2016), focusing on the promotional language of tourism. He has written two books: one on the social construct of authenticity in hypermediated tourism (‘Scripted Journeys’, De Gruyter 2021), and one on the influence of tourism on video games (‘Traveling Through Video Games’, Routledge 2023).
Pratik is a Senior Data Scientist in D-Lab at UC Berkeley, holding a PhD in Physics from UC Berkeley. Pratik lead’s D-Lab’s Special Projects, where he works with interdisciplinary teams to solve social science problems. He has expertise in data science and machine learning, and has conducted data-driven, interdisciplinary research in a variety of fields, including computational social science, computational health sciences, hate speech, political science, physics, neuroscience, and open-source software.
