What’s Trust Got <br>to Do With It?

Event ⋅ March 21 2024

What’s Trust Got
to Do With It?

Trust Issues: Perspectives on Community, Technology, and Trust

Chelsea Peterson-Salahuddin
Irene Solaiman
Jason D’Cruz
Sareeta Amrute

About the Trust Issues workshop

“I see it as my role, to the best of my ability, to communicate where institutions’ technology systems can do things to continually help build trust without being explicit about in-community conversations, very specific markers of trust, and specific things that people do within a community to gain trust.”

– Chelsea Peterson-Salahuddin

Event Description

On Thursday, March 21 in a conversation moderated by D&S Principal Researcher Sareeta Amrute, panelists Chelsea Peterson-Salahuddin, Irene Solaiman, and Jason D’Cruz discussed how practitioners, theorists, and community members approach the fraught issue of trust inside and outside institutions. Together, they considered how legacies of racism, dehumanization, refusal, and opacity inform trust — how it operates, and fails to operate, in data-centric spaces. They also discussed trust’s typical framing as a normative construct, as well as the meaning of mistrust and its consequences for vulnerable communities.

This public keynote was part of Trust Issues, a Data & Society workshop organized by the Trustworthy Infrastructures program. That team includes Sareeta Amrute, Livia Garofalo, Robyn Caplan, Joan Mukogosi, Tiara Roxanne, and Kadija Ferryman.

Speakers

Chelsea Peterson-Salahuddin | Twitter (X): @ChelsSalahuddin

Chelsea Peterson-Salahuddin (she/her) is a president’s postdoctoral fellow and incoming assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. Her research focuses on the culturally specific ways marginalized communities — most often Black women, femmes, and queer folks — engage with mass and digital communications technologies to seek information, produce knowledge, and build community, and how the infrastructure of these technologies helps them overcome or continue to replicate systemic barriers to equity. Chelsea’s research has been published in the peer-reviewed journals Critical Studies in Media Communication, New Media and Society, Social Media + Society, and Information, Communication & Society; and has received scholarly recognition from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Before pursuing a career in academia, Chelsea worked at CBS This Morning as an editorial producer. She received a Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi award, which recognizes exceptional professional journalism, for her role in CBS’s coverage of pharmaceutical companies’ price hikes on EpiPens. Chelsea received her MA and PhD in media, technology, and society from Northwestern University, and her BA in political science and media studies from Vassar College.

Irene Solaiman | Twitter (X): @IreneSolaiman

Irene Solaiman is an AI safety and policy expert and head of global policy at Hugging Face, where she is conducting social impact research and leading public policy. She serves on the Partnership on AI’s policy steering committee and the Center for Democracy and Technology’s AI Governance Lab Advisory Committee. She is also a tech ethics and policy mentor at Stanford University and an International Strategy Forum fellow at Schmidt Futures. Irene advises responsible AI initiatives at OECD and IEEE. Her research includes AI value alignment, responsible releases, and combating misuse and malicious use. In 2023, she was named one of MIT Technology Review‘s 35 Innovators Under 35.

Jason D’Cruz | Twitter (X): @jdcruzphil

Jason D’Cruz is associate professor of philosophy at the University at Albany, SUNY and the principal investigator of Trustworthiness from a User-Perspective, a multi-year project supported by the SUNY-IBM Research Alliance. He is also the faculty advisor for UAlbany’s Minorities and Philosophy chapter. Jason’s recent co-authored work, “Humble AI” and “The Empathy Gap,” focus on the ethical implications of applying machine learning to make predictions of human behavior.

Previously, he was a visiting scholar at the Centre de Recherche en Éthique (CRE) at Université de Montréal, and taught in the Harvard Writing Program and at the Zhejiang University of Science and Technology. Jason completed a PhD at Brown and a BA at Yale.