Robert Gorwa, WZB Berlin Social Science Center
Michael Veale, University College London
Via Zoom
To RSVP please email quello@msu.edu
Every time someone trains, deploys, or queries an ‘artificial intelligence’ system, whether they know it or not, they are implicating the practices and services of an enormous number of interlinked businesses in the AI ‘stack’. In this talk, Robert Gorwa and Michael Veale will present early findings from their ongoing book project on emerging public-private regulatory practices emerging across this stack, focusing on what does, could, and should be done to prevent very real emergent forms of AI misuse. As more obligations and responsibilities are foisted on or taken up by the various intermediaries that facilitate access to AI systems (e.g. cloud providers, model hosts, internet infrastructure providers), the talk will introduce some of the extremely tricky tensions relating to technological control, generativity, analytic capacity, and privacy that lay ahead.
Dr Robert Gorwa is a postdoctoral researcher at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), and a fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT, in Washington), and the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI, in Waterloo). He conducts interdisplinary empirical and conceptual research addressing the politics of technology policy, with a special interest in emerging socio-technical governance infrastructures and institutions in the platform economy.
Since Dr. Gorwa began his graduate work in media and communication/internet studies (MSc, 2017) and politics and international relations (DPhil, 2021) in Oxford, he has been publishing in leading interdisciplinary digital policy outlets, with work featured in venues like Big Data & Society, Information, Communication & Society, and ACM FAccT. His first book, The Politics of Platform Regulation: How Governments Shape Online Content Moderation, was published in 2024 by Oxford University Press.
Alongside this academic work, Dr. Gorwa writes for public and policy audiences, with pieces featured in a range of online and print publications like the LA Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, Wired Magazine, and Jacobin. He has presented his work for high-level policymakers in various jurisdictions, including at the US-EU Trade and Technology Council and the EU Observatory on the Online Platform Economy, and he has consulted for Human Rights Watch and other digital rights organizations.
Dr Michael Veale is Associate Professor and Vice-Dean (Education Innovation) in the Faculty of Laws, UCL. His expertise sits at the intersection of computer science and information law, considering issues of fundamental rights amidst advanced data analysis, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and encrypted computation.
Dr Veale is additionally IViR Fellow (Institute for Information Law, University of Amsterdam), a member of the Advisory Councils of the Open Rights Group and of Foxglove, the Technology Advisory Panel (TAP) of the Information Commissioner’s Office, and a research affiliate of the PILOT Lab at Penn State University. He previously has had advisory roles and written reports for the Ada Lovelace Institute, the Law Society of England and Wales, the Royal Society and the British Academy, the United Nations, Commonwealth Secretariat, BEUC, and the Open Society Foundations, amongst many others. He has previously worked at the Alan Turing Institute, the European Commission, and as adjunct professor at NYU. Dr Veale holds a PhD in the application of law and policy to the social challenges of machine learning from UCL (STEaPP and Computer Science), and degrees from Maastricht University and LSE.
His research on technology policy and his work bringing data rights issues to data protection regulators has been widely used by the media, governments, parliaments, regulators and international organisations, cited by over 250 non-academic bodies. He has been cited in the media over 200 times, in leading outlets including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Nature, the Economist, the BBC, all UK broadsheets, and many top international sources including Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine Z, and De Volkskrant, as well as on national and international television and radio. Dr Veale’s work is cited academically over 5,000 times by work across a wide range of disciplines.
In 2024, Dr Veale is Program Chair for the ACM FAccT Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency, and was General Chair of Hot Topics in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (HotPETS) from 2020-21. He sits on a wide range of programme committees
You can follow Michael Veale on Twitter (@mikarv) and on Mastodon in the Fediverse (@mikarv@someone.elses.computer).