On Wednesday, October 30, the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC), in collaboration with the Institute Community and Equity Office, present a panel discussion featuring several distinguished MIT professors. The timely conversation will focus on the critical role of artificial intelligence in both protecting and challenging electoral integrity and democracy.

This event is free and open to the MIT community. Attendees will have the opportunity to submit questions for the panel, and participate in a lively Q&A session. A reception will follow in the lobby of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing building.

Event Details

Date
Wednesday, October 30, 2024

Time
5:30-6:45 pm (panel discussion)
6:45-7:15 pm (reception)

Location
MIT Schwarzman College of Computing
51 Vassar Street, Building 45
Cambridge, MA 02139
Map

Panelists

Chara Podimata is the Class of 1942 Career Development Assistant Professor and an Assistant Professor of Operations Research/Statistics in MIT Sloan. She is interested in social aspects of computing and more specifically, the effects of humans adapting to machine learning algorithms used for consequential decision-making.

Charles Stewart III is the Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science at MIT, where he has taught since 1985, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His research and teaching areas include American politics congressional politics, elections, and American political development.

His research about Congress touches on the historical development of committees, origins of partisan polarization, and Senate elections. His books of congressional research include Budget Reform Politics, Electing the Senate (with Wendy J. Schiller), Fighting for the Speakership (with Jeffery A. Jenkins), and Analyzing Congress.

Professor Stewart is an established leader in the analysis of the performance of election systems and the quantitative assessment of election performance. Since 2001, Professor Stewart has been a member of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, a leading research effort that applies scientific analysis to questions about election technology, election administration, and election reform. He is currently the MIT director of the project. Working with the Pew Charitable Trusts, he helped with the development of Pew’s Elections Performance Index. Professor Stewart also provided advice to the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. His research on measuring the performance of elections and polling place operations has been funded by Pew, the Democracy Fund, and the Hewlett Foundation. As part of this research, he was the co-editor (with Barry C. Burden) of The Measure of American Elections.

In 2017, with the support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Democracy Fund, and the Joyce Foundation, Professor Stewart established the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, which applies scientific principles to how elections are studied and administered. In 2020, he partnered with Professor Nate Persily of the Stanford Law School to establish the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project.

David Rand is the Erwin H. Schell Professor and Professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, the director of the Applied Cooperation Initiative, and an affiliate of the MIT Institute of Data, Systems, and Society, and the Initiative on the Digital Economy.

Bridging the fields of cognitive science, behavioral economics, and social psychology, David’s research combines behavioral experiments run online and in the field with mathematical and computational models to understand people’s attitudes, beliefs, and choices. His work uses a cognitive science perspective grounded in the tension between more intuitive versus deliberative modes of decision-making. He focuses on illuminating why people believe and share misinformation and “fake news,” understanding political psychology and polarization, and promoting human cooperation.

Moderator

Kevin Mills joined MIT as a postdoctoral associate in 2021 and began his appointment in SERC in 2023. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Northeastern University (2019-2021), and received his PhD from Indiana University Bloomington (2019). His two broad areas of research are metaethics and technology ethics. In metaethics, his research explores the prospects for interdisciplinary work in ethics, especially collaborative ventures between scientists and philosophers. To shed light on this, he looks at the roles empirical knowledge can and cannot play in normative reasoning. In technology ethics, he is particularly interested in how the internet and artificial intelligence are transforming our society, and the many ethical challenges this raises. At MIT, he works primarily on issues surrounding privacy, data collection, misinformation, and online manipulation.