Date/Time
Tuesday
28 Jan 2025
2:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Location
Dwinelle 7415

Event Type
Non-CSTMS Event

Armen Khatchatouro
Associate Professor, Université Gustave Eiffel

David Bates
Professor, UC Berkeley

The proliferation of AI-based systems has led to new ways of understanding what normativity is. On the one hand, following Foucault, we have to reconsider how social normativity is translated into dynamic AI systems rather than a slow-evolving set of social rules. Here, the question is what is (provisionally) considered as error or bias, and with respect to which referent – and how deviation and alignment are addressed.

On the other hand, social normativity itself —  not only in its content but in the very way we relate to it — is affected by the opacity and adjustability of machine-learning models, which nevertheless produce new expectations, behaviors and a form of algorithmic governmentality.

This half-day workshop aims to hold both questions together, in order to address their intertwined nature; it will reunite interdisciplinary scholars in philosophy and the humanities from Berkeley, Stanford, Paris and Dublin.

Tentative Schedule:

14:00 – Armen Khatchatourov (Université Gustave Eiffel)

14:30 – Noel Fitzpatrick (TU Dublin, tbc)

15:00 – David Bates (UC Berkeley)

15:30 – Break

16:00 – Anne Alombert (Université Paris 8, Paris)

16:30 – Johan Fredrikzon (Stanford)

17:00 – General discussion

Armen Khatchatourov is Associate Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at DICEN-IdF Lab, University Gustave Eiffel, Paris, France. He has a double background (engineering degree and PhD in philosophy of technology) and has previously worked as Senior Researcher at Institut Mines-Télécom; as HMI-AI Associate Researcher at Sony Computer Science Lab Paris; as HMI Researcher at Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble as well as at the Institute of Research and Innovation/Centre Pompidou. He has also taught at University of Technology of Compiègne, Ecole des Ponts, Paris 1 – Sorbonne as well as in art and design schools (EESI, Strate, ENSAM). His research interests include digital identities, privacy and data protection, smart-cities and more generally the effects of Big Data an AI on the society and governance.

He published Digital Identities in Tension: Between Autonomy and Control (ISTE/Wiley, 2019) and directed Corps Connectés. Figures, fragments, discours (Presses des Mines, 2022) and he is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal Etudes Digitales.

Readings:

1. Foucault, M., (2008). The birth of biopolitics: lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979 (1st Picador pbk ed). Picador. (In particular Lecture 10)
2. Dourish, Paul. “What We Talk about When We Talk about Context.” Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 8.1 (2004): 19–30. Web. PUC2004-context.pdf
3. Khatchatourov, A., (2019). Digital identities in tension: between autonomy and control. ISTE, Ltd. ; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.  See the dedicated chapter, pp 77 – 92 : Author’s PDF available
4. Helen Nissenbaum, Symposium, Privacy as Contextual Integrity, 79 Wash. L. Rev. 119 (2004).
5. Rouvroy, A., Berns, T., Translated by Carey-Libbrecht, L. (2013). Algorithmic governmentality and prospects of emancipation Disparateness as a precondition for individuation through relationships? Réseaux, No 177(1), 163-196.

For more information about this event, please visit the UC Berkeley Rhetoric Department website. If you have any questions about this event, please contact Eve Letendre, Access Coordinator, at rfa@berkeley.edu.