HoAI Summer School - 12-16 July 2021

The University of Cambridge is hosting a Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Histories of AI: A Genealogy of Power from May 2020–December 2021. The Seminar is co-hosted by the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, and the Faculty of English. Sawyer Seminars support comparative research on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments. This Seminar aims to develop an international interpretive community capable of offering a structural, historical perspective on the promises and problematics of AI and machine learning.

From 12-16 July 2021, the HoAI Summer School will convene a community of scholars from around the globe interested in offering historical perspectives on the promises and problematics of AI and machine learning. Participants are welcome from a variety of fields and backgrounds including activists, AI practitioners, artists, citizens, critical theorists, decolonial scholars, historians of science and technology, and scholars of race, gender, and disability studies. We will engage in critical and comparative research on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments in AI technologies to investigate their entanglement in systems of politics, power and control. Four themes guide our considerations: hidden labour, encoded behaviour, cognitive injustice and disingenuous rhetoric. These themes direct our inquiry without narrowing the contributions we plan to support.

This Summer School will be entirely virtual. We will host two sessions per day at hours designed to accommodate participants from a range of time zones.

On 12 July, the opening day, we will host a social 'Meet and Greet' Poster Session from 13:00-14:30 BST in which members of the community can meet each other and learn about each others' research projects. To submit a 1 page poster of your work to this session, please submit an abstract here before midnight BST on 16th June 2021.

From 13-16 July, from 13:00-14:30 each day, we will host 'work in progress' presentations of new research by a handful of contributors to a recent call for papers for a proposed journal special issue on the Histories of Artificial Intelligence. These session are designed to accommodate discussion about the working drafts.

12 July

13:00-14:30 BST - Meet and Greet' Poster Session

15:00-17:00 BST - Keynote by Wendy Chun (Simon Fraser University)

13 July

13:00-14:30 BST - Presentations by Proposed Journal Special Issue Contributors

15:30-17:00 BST - Keynote by Ruha Benjamin (Princeton University) *Please note the later start time

14 July

13:00-14:30 BST - Presentations by Proposed Journal Special Issue Contributors

15:00-17:00 BST - Keynote by Kalindi Vora (UC Davis)

15 July

13:00-14:30 BST - Presentations by Proposed Journal Special Issue Contributors

15:00-17:00 BST - Keynote by Ulises A. Mejias (SUNY Oswego)

16 July

13:00-14:30 BST - Presentations by Proposed Journal Special Issue Contributors

15:00-17:00 BST - Closing Meeting