FAccT at Milieux : An evening of AI events and programming
June 27 | 17:00 - 20:00
This year, the 9th annual ACM FAccT conference will be held in Montréal from June 25-28 at Le Centre Sheraton.
On Saturday 27, Milieux Institute and Abundant Intelligences will host an off-site evening of AI events and programming.
5-6 PM: Workshop
From Formal Benchmarks to Street-Smart AI Certifications: Community-Grounded Approaches
Who evaluates AI, and how? Our workshop gathers interdisciplinary practitioners outside the traditional evaluation community to define and expand benchmarking and evaluation practices of AI from industry-defined performance measures to more participatory and interdisciplinary approaches that evaluate AI as systems, in ways that are grounded, multi-criteria, dynamic, holistic, accessible, and practical.
6-8 PM: Fenwick McKelvey’s Book Launch and Meet & Greet with Milieux and Abundant Intelligences
Join us from 6pm to 8pm to meet Abundant Intelligences and the Milieux Institute and celebrate the launch of Fenwick McKelvey’s book SimPolitics: America’s Quest to Solve Politics with Computers.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
How computer models became fundamental to political practice—from winning elections to global affairs—and how we imagine political futures as a computing problem.
For more than six decades, the public has been promised that computers will revolutionize politics, both nationally and internationally. In SimPolitics, Fenwick McKelvey traces the entwined history of politics and computers from the 1960s to the late 1980s. He shows how programmers, consultants, academics, political scientists, and peace activists all worked—sometimes in tandem, sometimes not—to build simulations to win campaigns, predict coups, forecast the future, and render politics as legible as a spreadsheet.
Drawing on novel archival and historical research, McKelvey recounts the history of efforts to simulate politics by building models of elections, voters, and international relations. Comparing attempts in the United States to simulate domestic electoral politics and international affairs, he reveals the unexamined connections and conflicts between the two projects. His book provides a helpful guide to taking stock of exaggerated claims that AI and technology will fix politics, while presenting the long history of such promised technological fixes.
ABOUT ACM FAccT:
ACM FAccT is an interdisciplinary conference dedicated to bringing together a diverse community of scholars from computer science, law, social sciences, and humanities to investigate and tackle issues in this emerging area. Research challenges are not limited to technological solutions regarding potential bias, but include the question of whether decisions should be outsourced to data- and code-driven computing systems. We particularly seek to evaluate technical solutions with respect to existing problems, reflecting upon their benefits and risks; to address pivotal questions about economic incentive structures, perverse implications, distribution of power, and redistribution of welfare; and to ground research on fairness, accountability, and transparency in existing legal requirements.
