Congratulations to Dr. Will bateman (Australian National University, Law School) on his third HMI policy paper ‘Explanatory Memorandum: Model Law on the Registration of Algorithmic Decision - Systems’. Click through to read the full paper.

Congratulations to Dr. Will bateman (Australian National University, Law School) on his second HMI policy paper ‘Legal Audit of AI in the Public Sector’. Click through to read the full paper.

Congratulations to Dr. Will bateman (Australian National University, Law School) and Dr. Julia Powles (University of Western Australia, Law School) for their first HMI policy paper ‘Legal Audit of AI in the Public Sector’ funded by the Minderoo Foundation.

Particular AI-related research and analysis needs have been identified by the Bangladesh Aspire to Innovate (a2i) Programme of the ICT Division and Cabinet Division of Bangladesh. Applicants are asked to choose one research question/problem, under either ‘Continuous Assessment’’ or ‘Pregnancy Monitoring’, to respond to in a policy research paper. (Representatives from the relevant government agencies will provide guidance to the researchers as they develop their papers.). Click through for more details!

Congratulations to Dr. Sarah Logan of the Australian National University and Dr. Jasper Tromp of the National University of Singapore for winning research grants for this EOI. Sarah and Jasper will create a policy relevant papers for the Thai government in the areas of ‘Poverty Alleviation’ and ‘Medicine & Healthcare’ respectively.

Will Bateman presented ‘COVID, Artificial Intelligence and litigation against the government’ at the ACT Law Society on the 30th of September 2020. Click through for more information.

Making sure our artificial intelligence doesn't turn evil is a big task. But who's values should we base the programming of these machines off? Dr. Claire Benn talks to Rod Quinn about how we make sure we end up with safe, ethical AI. Listen here.

In this interview, Claire Benn discussed the ethics of facial recognition, from the trends we have seen across the world concerning the development and deployment of facial recognition to the future role facial recognition might play here in Australia. Beginning with the core components of all facial recognition, Dr Benn explores the dangers and opportunities facial recognition presents when it goes right and when it goes wrong.

Interview with Nick Byrne from the consulting and media company TypeHuman about issues of ethics in technological design, based on ideas from Jenny L. Davis’s new book "How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things". Watch here or click through for more information.

In a commissioned essay for TypeHuman, Jenny argues for techno-activism as a way of upending inequalities that have been exacerbated by existing technological systems. Read here or click through for more information.

An interview between Vikram Singh and Jenny Davis about her book "How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things" (MIT Press 2020). The interview is published in the DisAssemble Newsletter, a publication for design theorists and practitioners. Read here or click through for more information.

Can policymakers detoxify social media? Listen to HMI CI Jenny Davis, Dr Jennifer Hunt, and Yun Jiang discuss online hate, anti-social behaviour on digital platforms, and what policymakers can do about it.

What does it mean to understand and design democratic AI? Seth Lazar introduces the methodological approach of the HMI team, and explains the goal of designing democratically legitimate machine intelligence.

Jenny Davis launched her new book ‘How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things’ (MIT Press 2020) on November 12 2020 at the ANU. This included a panel discussion with Benjamin Hemmings and Hedda Rasan-Cooper. Click through for more information.

Seth Lazar was recently invited to join the National Academies of Science Engineering and Mathematics Study on Responsible Computing Research: Ethics and Governance of Computing Research and its Applications committee.

Seth Lazar joined the Templeton World Charity Foundation Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute as faculty, giving talks on the moral and political epistemology of data and AI, and the Value of Explanations.

Colin Klein (ANU), Andrew Barron (Macquarie) and Marta Halina (Cambridge) have been awarded a grant to study "The major transitions in the evolution of cognition" from the Templeton World Charity Foundation. This $1M USD grant will fund research into the major shifts in computational organisation that allowed evolving brains to process information in new ways. Researchers at the ANU, led by CI Klein, will explore the philosophical foundations of computational neuroscience.

Jenny Davis was elected as incoming Chair-Elect for the Communication, Information, Technologies & Media Sociology section for the American Sociological Association