The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is hosting its monthly colloquium series and invites everyone to participate in the April session. This month's event will be led by Anita Chan, Associate Professor in in the School of Information Sciences and Department of Media and Cinema Studies, and director of the Community Data Clinic at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She will present "Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future".
The insidious legacy of eugenics lives on in the algorithmic authoritarianism, and data-driven discrimination of Big Tech. At the turn of the 20th century, eugenicists compiled harmful data about marginalized people, fueling racial divisions, anti-democratic fervor and majoritiarian paranoias under the guise of streamlining society towards the future. Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future draws a direct line between the datafication and prediction techniques of past eugenicists and today's violent and extractive "big data" regimes. This talk reveals how the AI-driven and market-based models of Big Tech are founded on methods that exploit women and immigrant groups, amplifying social hierarchies, suppressing diverse voices and influencing AI's predictions of majoritarian outcomes as the most probable, likely, and “ideal” futures. But it also explores how it doesn’t have to be this way, illuminating the trailblazing efforts of feminist and immigrant activists from a century ago who resisted dominant institutional research norms through alternative data practices. By looking to the past to shape our future, this talk charts a path for an alternative historical consciousness rooted in global justice.