The Centre for Law, Technology and Society is delighted to announce that Faculty member Dr.Elizabeth Dubois will join the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Societyat Harvard University this fall to lead enquiry into political actors' interactions with artificial intelligence and automated systems.
The Centre for Law, Technology and Society is delighted to announce that CLTS Faculty member Dr. Elizabeth Dubois, has been awarded the University of Ottawa Research Chair in Politics, Communication and Technology. The new Chair aims to undertake an innovative and interdisciplinary research program focused on the social dynamics of automation and AI in political information environments.
From simple automation to artificial intelligence (AI), the tools underpinning our political information environment are useful but they also facilitate online harms, like harassment or disinformation, and exacerbate inequalities.
Our political systems and interactions are necessarily impacted by the Internet and other digital tools. Optimistic views point to the democratizing power of user generated content, reduced barriers to entry, and greater ability to interact with people from different backgrounds. But alongside benefits are also online harms including harassment, disinformation, and privacy concerns. Governments must play a role in regulating digital tools to protect the public good but are struggling to navigate the best ways to incentivize ethical development of new technologies while minimizing harm. Evidence-based policy making for fair and ethical technology development and public policy is thus essential.
To minimize online harms, and develop better public policy, we must understand how algorithms and AI are integrated into political information environments – a deeply social process. The University Research Chair will focus on social interactions amongst various actors and tools in a networked political information environment. This ranges from examining how journalists deal with political bot-supported harassment campaigns, to how personalization algorithms impact political opinion development, to how social media influencers call on audiences to strategically engage with their content in order to feed the prioritization algorithms to get them back on the “right” side of platforms like TikTok. The common thread is a focus on social relationships that are enacted with (and through) digital tools. The Chair’s work will begin to address the urgent need to bring a humanities and social sciences perspective to the development of fair and ethical automation and AI. The Chair will support the development of public policy and technical solutions which minimize online harm and prioritize fair and ethical development and uses of automation and AI. It will serve as a hub for multi-stakeholder engagement through a regular podcast, public lectures and conferences, public policy reports, and outreach activities.
Over the past six years, Dr. Dubois worked to establish research and policy agendas for understanding citizenship in a digital context and led an international 18-team collaboration to analyze the digital media ecosystem during the 2019 federal election in Canada (a project which has been used as a model for election research internationally). These initiatives highlighted the crucial relationship between individuals and their digital tools.
Dr. Elizabeth Dubois is a Faculty member at the Centre for Law, Technology and Society and an Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa where she runs the Pol Comm Tech Lab, a multi-disciplinary research group focused on exploring the intersections of politics, communication, and technology, which includes political scientists, computer scientists, and communication scholars. Dr. Dubois also hosts the Wonks and War Rooms podcast, where political communication theory meets on the ground strategy.
Congratulations to Dr. Dubois!