Keynote speakers

Bio: Virginia Dignum is Professor of Responsible Artificial Intelligence at Umeå University, Sweden where she leads the AI Policy Lab. She is also senior advisor on AI policy to the Wallenberg Foundations. She has a PHD in Artificial Intelligence from Utrecht University in 2004, is member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA), and Fellow of the European Artificial Intelligence Association (EURAI). She is a member of the United Nations Advisory Body on AI, the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI), UNESCO’s expert group on the implementation of AI recommendations, OECD’s Expert group on AI, founder of ALLAI, the Dutch AI Alliance, and co-chair of the WEF’s Global Future Council on AI. She was a member of EU’s High Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence and leader of UNICEF’s guidance for AI and children. Her new book “The AI Paradox” is planned for publication in late 2024.

URL: https://www.umu.se/en/staff/virginia-dignum/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vdignum/
X: https://twitter.com/vdignum

Talk description: 

AI can extend human capabilities but requires addressing challenges in education, jobs, and biases. Taking a responsible approach involves understanding AI’s nature, design choices, societal role, and ethical considerations. Recent AI developments, including foundational models, transformer models, generative models, and large language models (LLMs), raise questions about whether they are changing the paradigm of AI, and about the responsibility of those that are developing and deploying AI systems. In all these developments, is vital to understand that AI is not an autonomous entity but rather dependent on human responsibility and decision-making.

In this talk, I will further discuss the need for a responsible approach to AI that emphasize trust, cooperation, and the common good. Taking responsibility involves regulation, governance, and awareness. Ethics and dilemmas are ongoing considerations, but require understanding that trade-offs must be made and that decision processes are always contextual. Taking responsibility requires designing AI systems with values in mind, implementing regulations, governance, monitoring, agreements, and norms. Rather than viewing regulation as a constraint, it should be seen as a stepping stone for innovation, ensuring public acceptance, driving transformation, and promoting business differentiation. Responsible Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not an option but the only possible way to go forward in AI.

Bio: Dr. Marc Hassenzahl is professor for “Ubiquitous Design / Experience and Interaction” at the University of Siegen, Germany. He combines his training in psychology with a love for interaction design. With his group of designers and psychologists, he explores the theory and practice of designing pleasurable, meaningful and transforming interactive technologies. Marc is author of “Experience Design. Technology for all the right reasons” (MorganClaypool), co-author of “Psychologie in der nutzerzentrierten Produktgestaltung. Mensch-Technik-Interaktion-Erlebnis” (“People, Technology, Interaction, Experience”) (Springer, with Sarah Diefenbach) and many peer-reviewed papers at the seams of psychology, design research and interaction/industrial design. In 2022, he was elected as member of the SIGCHI academy.

URL: www.marc-hassenzahl.de
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/experience.interact/

Talk description: 

“I exist in two places, here and where you are” – designing technology-mediated relatedness

Feelings of closeness, togetherness, relatedness, or intimacy are major ingredients of people’s wellbeing. While those feelings certainly require physical proximity now and then, technology has been and continues to be instrumental for creating  and maintaining relatedness over the distance. From phone calls and Zoom to social media and virtual worlds – interactive technology is an inseparable part of a multitude of everyday interpersonal practices. What is often underestimated, though, is the subtlety in which those technologies shape the relationships they mediate. In fact, phones and videoconferencing systems are far from neutral devices for people to exchange information at will. In particular through functionality and interaction design, devices encourage certain  interpersonal practices and discourage others.

In this talk, I will revisit more than ten years of own experience with building subtle and maybe not so subtle devices to create and maintain the social over the distance. I will critically review our design rationales, as well as tell stories about successes and failures to establish and reshape interpersonal practices through designed interaction.

Bio: With a background as an interaction design scholar at UC Irvine and the founding member of its Transformative Play Lab, Theresa Tanenbaum is an independent consultant songwriter, speaker, storyteller, poet, researcher, scholar, designer, artist, and activist. Her interdisciplinary scholarly and creative practices are concerned with questions of identity, justice, and equity, seeking to create emancipatory possibilities for victims of systemic oppression through play, music, story, and art. Her work draws together theories and practices across trans & queer studies, theatre and music, disability studies, play and game studies, narratology, black feminisms, larp, and digital media studies.

Medium: https://medium.com/@tesstanenbaum

@tdrtanenbaum.bsky.social
Google Scholar | https://transformativeplay.ics.uci.edu/

Talk description:

In this talk, Dr. Theresa Jean Tanenbaum (“Tess”) theorizes an emancipatory design practice intended to restore agency and power to those of us who have suffered at the hands of the oppressive normative social order (which is to say, most of us). This work emerges from her perspective as a neurodivergent, queer, disabled, transgender, woman and practicing Witch. She illustrates this new practice with a vulnerable autoethnographic discussion of her own experiences of gender transition, and with examples from larp, tabletop roleplaying games, and popular media, situating these examples within an interdisciplinary crossroads of theories and perspectives from psychology, media studies, and design.

Her wide ranging talk puts avant garde filmmaker and anthropologist Maya Deren’s writing about Balinese witchcraft in the 1940s in conversation with black feminist poet and scholar Audre Lorde, transgender game designer Avery Alder, larp designer and theorist Jonaya Kemper, and digital learning theorists Ebony Elizabeth Thomas and Amy Stornaiulo, all in service of a new mode of design that is indistinguishable from magical practice and activism.