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HCII Seminar Series - Nazanin Andalibi

Naz Andalibi

Speaker
Nazanin (Naz) Andalibi
Assistant Professor, University of Michigan School of Information

When
-

Where
This seminar will be presented virtually.

Video
Video link

Description

"Where is the Human in Emotion Recognition/AI Technologies?"

Emotions are powerful, mediate humans’ experiences with their surroundings, and impact decision-making and attention online and off. Sharing and signaling one’s emotions to other humans can be beneficial, but involves privacy calculations and complex decision-making processes. Indeed, human emotions are deeply personal and contextual. Yet, artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that claim to recognize, detect, predict, and infer emotions, emotional states, and mental health status — broadly referred to as emotion recognition/AI — are on the rise. Emotion recognition/AI uses data sources such as social media behavior, streaming service use, voice, facial expressions, biometrics, and body language in ways often unknown to data subjects.

Interdisciplinary critical emotion recognition/AI discourse centers validity concerns, racial bias, misalignments with emotion theories, and calls to ban it until more is known about its harms and risks. In this talk, I will share my recent mixed methods work on: 1) data subjects’ attitudes toward and conceptions of emotion recognition/AI; and 2) inventors’ conceptions and justifications of emotion recognition/AI developed in contexts such as work and mental health. I will conclude by discussing this work’s implications and future directions. I advocate for human-centered, relational ethics, and justice-oriented approaches in the design, development, deployment, evaluation, and regulation of emotion recognition/AI.

Speaker's Bio

Dr. Nazanin Andalibi is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. She is also affiliated with the Center for Social Media Responsibility, the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing, and the Digital Studies Institute. Her research interests are in social computing and HCI. Her work centers around relationships between emotions, identity, and technologies in contexts ranging from social media to artificial intelligence, often with attention to marginalization, social positions, and power.

Andalibi's scholarship informs theory, design, activism, and policy for socio-technical futures that foreground marginalized individuals’ values and needs to support qualities such as wellbeing, privacy, ethics, and justice. Andalibi’s work is published in venues including ACM CHI, CSCW, TOCHI, JMIR, and New Media and Society, and featured by media outlets such as CNN, Fast Company, and Huffington Post. Her publications have received Best Paper and Honorable Mention Awards at ACM CHI and CSCW and her work is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Digital Studies Institute.

Speaker's Website
https://www.nazaninandalibi.net/

Host
Motahhare Eslami