by Maryam Mehrnezhad
On Saturday, 13 July 2024, some members of the AGENCY Research team presented some of our work on gender and cybersecurity, online privacy, safety and trust in AI/ML and digital health and medical technologies.
This event (Tech Back Your Bits!) was organised by bleepDigital (https://www.bleepdigital.org/), hosted by Vagina Museum in London. The Vagina Museum is the world’s first physical museum about the female reproductive system, located in London. Thanks to Isabel Straw (Director of bleepDigital) for inviting me to be a panel member and our team to have a station to engage with the public. Shout out to the other panellists for all the thought-provoking conversations: Nikolaos Koukopoulos, Shakir Mohamed, and Xiao Liu.
From the AGENCY team, Adrian Bermudez Villalva (Research Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London) discussed his recent work on the measurement of online hate. We will publish the results of this study soon (stay tuned!) Ehsan Toreini (University of Surrey) and Zoya Pourmirza (University of Birmingham) had conversations with the people who visited our station on how the complex risks and harms of modern technologies need to be identified and addressed now. Taylor Leigh Robinson and I focused on FemTech (e.g., menopause tech) and the differential risks of such technologies on people.
The event had two parts. In the afternoon, four different stations were featured to demonstrate to the public how modern technologies can be risky to people. The four stations included:
- Station 1: Bias in Artificial Intelligence
- Station 2: Hacking Station: Medjacking, Flipping & Gender and Tech Abuse
- Station 3: Data Privacy and Fem Tech
- Station 4: Biohacking and Biotech Station
Where the third one was led by the AGENCY team from 3 to 6 pm.
It then had a panel from 7:30 to 9:30 pm featuring panellists from different backgrounds to answer some of the important questions raised by the public. The panellists included: Nikolaos Koukopoulos (KCL), Shakir Mohamed (Google DeepMind), Maryam Mehrnezhad (RHUL) and Xiao Liu (University of Birmingham and the NHS).
During my conversations with the attendees and later with the other panellists, I realised how we all need to continue these important conversations around the usability, and indeed, the “abusability” of emerging technologies to make sure that ALL people are entitled to use emerging tech to improve the quality of their lives without RISK and FEAR. At some point, I compared AI with nuclear tech or genetic sciences! That is how much I am concerned about the abusability of AI on issues such as bias and discrimination, misinformation, deepfake and image-based sexual abuse and at-risk groups such as children. Please share your thoughts with us!
Thanks to my friends and colleagues who came to the event to support us. A few people indicated that they know us from Linkedin and X (kudos to these platforms)! If you have not had a chance to discuss your ideas and thoughts with us, please email us.
AGENCY Research is funded by EPSRC (via REPHRAIN National Research Centre on Privacy, Harm Reduction and Adversarial Influence Online) and is a large multi-disciplinary project working on “Assuring Citizen Agency in a World with Complex Online Harms”. See the project page here.
