“Algorithms” are becoming unavoidable in our daily lives:
These changes mostly happen without the consultation of the general public, leaving them no choice but to adapt to new, black-box tools, if they want to be able to keep on participating in society. Nonetheless, people have shown to be very interested in the possibilities and advancements of automated decision-making systems, but are often faced with misinformation, delivered by poorly-informed public personalities following their undisclosed agendas.
There is a lack of comprehensible, reliable and easily accessible presentations and tutorials on automated decision-making systems targeted to the general public.
We would like to promote the creation of projects aiming at designing demonstrations/art installations/user experiences. Such demonstrations would have the goal to help the general public to gain a better understanding of automated decision-making systems, as well as the huge amounts of data that are captured about us and the digital traces we leave in our daily lives. Hence, these demonstrations would serve as educational tools for children, their parents and grand–parents. In addition, the research conducted in these projects could lead to new transparency and explainability techniques for future applications of automated decision-making systems, as well as inspire policy makers to write new transparency policies and guidelines to be respected by companies and industries.
At the heart of the artistic output is a thought, critique, question, explanation or exploration on automatic decision-making systems, and the relationship of human users with these systems. An important point is to not fall into romanticization and/or dramatization, but to remain accurate and honest, to not spread further misinformation.
We invite students from backgrounds other than computer science to follow an internship, supervised by researchers from the AI lab and the WISE lab.
Little programming skills are required from the student during the internship; rather, a thorough literature study on the particular algorithm or data-related problem showcased in the demo is mandatory, to ensure the student has a good understanding of their topic. The technical/programming part is assumed by the supervisors at WISE and AI. The art student brings the concept, the vision, the content, the creative aspect, and builds the art piece around the software.
The output of the internship is an original art installation or demonstration, as well as a project report/thesis. In addition, a paper presenting the project could be submitted to relevant conferences art+tech conferences.
