As you likely know, cities around the world are increasingly adopting surveillance technologies in the hope of solving a variety of problems. While these technologies may have potential benefits for a city's residents, they can also harm some communities and can have a negative impact on people's civil liberties.

Earlier this year, Portland's City Council passed a surveillance policy resolution to increase transparency and accountability in the use of surveillance technologies in Portland. As part of the resolution, Smart City PDX has been tasked with designing and implementing a citywide inventory of surveillance technologies owned or used by City Bureaus — and they want your input!

At this month's meeting, Hector Dominguez, Open Data Coordinator at Smart City PDX, within Portland's Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, will join us to share information about the surveillance technology inventory and how its development is progressing.

His team has put together a survey where you can submit your thoughts about what information should be included in the inventory: https://arcg.is/10u9Cf0

Take the survey; then come to the meeting, and bring your questions and ideas about what information should be included in the inventory!

Please RSVP via this Meetup page or by sending an email to [email protected].

Speaker bio:

Hector Dominguez is the Open Data Coordinator at the City of Portland. In 2009, Portland became the first city in the United States to adopt an Open Data Resolution to encourage the expansion of the technological community by promoting open data and partnerships between City government and the public, private and nonprofit sectors, academia, and labor.

By attending this TA3M meeting, you agree to follow our Code of Conduct: https://www.meetup.com/Portlands-Techno-Activism-3rd-Mondays/pages/22681732/Code_of_Conduct/

{short} Code of Conduct Portland's Techno-Activism 3rd Mondays is dedicated to providing an informative and positive experience for everyone who participates in or supports our community, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, ability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, socioeconomic status, caste, or creed.

Our events are intended to educate and share information related to technology and activism, and anyone who is there for this purpose is welcome. Because we value the safety and security of our members and strive to have an inclusive community, we do not tolerate harassment of members or event participants in any form.

Audio and video recording are not permitted at meetings without prior approval.

Our Code of Conduct (https://www.meetup.com/Portlands-Techno-Activism-3rd-Mondays/pages/22681732/Code_of_Conduct/) applies to all events run by Portland's TA3M. Please report any incidents to the event organizer.

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is currently in the news almost every day — chatbots like ChatGPT, image generators like Dall-E, and a host of other tools are now available and being put to use in a variety of ways.

While these software algorithms can potentially help us to work faster and smarter, there are many issues to consider in whether and how to implement them. Details that must be addressed include: What data is being used to train the language models? Who owns the source data and the outputs that are generated? How accurate are the models? How much human oversight of the model-building process is there? And what are the potential harms when things go wrong?

These algorithms are already being used to make decisions about people’s lives, like whether a person gets a job or a bank loan and how much time a person convicted of a crime might spend in jail, but students in particular are having their lives and actions analyzed more and more every day. For instance, proctoring software tries to determine whether students are cheating on exams, other software looks for plagiarism in student essays and reports, and there’s even software that analyzes emotions and/or physical objects — Is the student happy or angry? Are they holding a cellphone or a gun?

This month, leaders from Encode Justice Oregon — Maansi Singh, Sahana Srinivasan, and Julianne Huang — will join us to share their experiences and their work on drafting policy recommendations for use of AI in schools. They’ll speak about their concerns and how they think these technologies should be used in educational settings. They'll also discuss the upcoming Youth Citizens Assembly, which will give students an opportunity to add their voices to the digital privacy conversation and pitch their own ideas.

Come join us, and bring your questions and thoughts about AI in schools!

Please RSVP via the Meetup link or by sending an email to [email protected].

Speaker bios:

Encode Justice is a global coalition of youth activists fighting for justice and accountability in the digital age. Oregon’s chapter, Encode Justice Oregon, works to educate their school, local and statewide communities about algorithmic fairness while supporting legislation that encourages the safe and effective implementation of new technologies. From working with the Oregon DOJ's Consumer Privacy Task Force to engaging in connections with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Smart City PDX, PDX Privacy, and Rose Haven, Encode Justice Oregon has established a statewide presence centered around furthering the digital privacy and equitable technology movement.

Maansi Singh is a senior at Jesuit High School in Portland, Oregon. She is the Founder and Executive Director of the Encode Justice Oregon Chapter. Maansi has participated in discussions surrounding the role of youth advocacy in AI ethics with organizations such as the United Nations, Washington Post, Google, ACLU, Meta and the World Economic Forum. Maansi believes that intellectual curiosity and the pursuit of new questions surrounding AI are ontological components of the ongoing discussion about human rights. Through Encode Justice and other efforts, she has pursued the intersection between computer science, ethics, policy and education.

Sahana Srinivasan is a sophomore at Jesuit High School. She is the Director of Education for Encode Justice Oregon. She is especially interested in the intersection of AI in medicine. AI ethics is important to her because in the medical field, it is critical that AI systems are both accurate, reliable, and without bias.

Julianne Huang serves as the Co-Director of Research for Encode Justice’s Oregon Chapter. Her position allows her to bring a youth voice into the AI Ethics conversation and inspires her to continue being an advocate for people like her who have grown up in a tech-centered world. Outside of EJ, she is a math and science enthusiast who enjoys participating in dance and choir.

By attending this TA3M meeting, you agree to follow our Code of Conduct: https://www.meetup.com/Portlands-Techno-Activism-3rd-Mondays/pages/22681732/Code_of_Conduct/

{short} Code of Conduct Portland's Techno-Activism 3rd Mondays is dedicated to providing an informative and positive experience for everyone who participates in or supports our community, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, ability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, socioeconomic status, caste, or creed.

Our events are intended to educate and share information related to technology and activism, and anyone who is there for this purpose is welcome. Because we value the safety and security of our members and strive to have an inclusive community, we do not tolerate harassment of members or event participants in any form.

Audio and video recording are not permitted at meetings without prior approval.

Our Code of Conduct (https://www.meetup.com/Portlands-Techno-Activism-3rd-Mondays/pages/22681732/Code_of_Conduct/) applies to all events run by Portland's TA3M. Please report any incidents to the event organizer.

Last month, we heard about the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in our educational system, but these technologies are also being incorporated into many other commercial and social enterprises that impact our daily lives, including the fields of medicine, journalism, finance, human resources, law enforcement, and transportation, just to name a few.

While AI technologies may be beneficial to society, how do we know that the systems being developed are trustworthy and that they actually do what their creators claim? Can developers explain how their AI systems work and demonstrate that the outputs they generate are not biased? How might governments regulate these systems? Should companies be allowed to regulate themselves? How might governments and companies work together to ensure fairness and understandability of what the systems are doing?

Last year, World Privacy Forum, a privacy-focused research nonprofit, studied various AI governance tools currently in use around the world. They recently published their findings via a report that was co-authored by Pam Dixon, executive director of World Privacy Forum, and Kate Kaye, deputy director of the organization: https://www.worldprivacyforum.org/2023/12/new-report-risky-analysis-assessing-and-improving-ai-governance-tools/

At this month's meeting, World Privacy Forum’s Kate Kaye will join us to share the details of their research methodologies and what they learned about how governments are overseeing the implementation of AI in their countries. She'll give an overview of what AI is and what it does, and she'll also present some examples of both effective and ineffective approaches to good governance of these systems.

Bring your questions and thoughts about AI governance, and come join the discussion!

Please RSVP via this Meetup page or by sending an email to [email protected].

Speaker bio:

Kate Kaye is a Portland resident and deputy director of World Privacy Forum, a nonpartisan public-interest research nonprofit. Her research focuses on the implications of AI, digital identity and health data ecosystems, data governance, and other issues related to data collection, use and privacy.

Before joining World Privacy Forum, Kate worked for more than 20 years as an award-winning journalist covering data, emerging technology and the impact of tech on people and society. Her reporting has been seen and heard in MIT Technology Review, NPR, Protocol, Bloomberg CityLab, OneZero, WSJ, Fast Company, and other media outlets.

Kate is the founder of tech and AI ethics reporting website RedTailMedia.org. RedTail has been home to some of her work investigating algorithmic and surveillance tech policy and use in Portland including Banned in PDX, a podcast series about Portland’s facial recognition ban, and an investigation of the city’s collapsed partnership with Google-sibling Replica, a location and mobility tracking company. Kate is the author of the 2009 book on digital voter data use, Campaign ’08: A turning point for digital media.

By attending this TA3M meeting, you agree to follow our Code of Conduct: https://www.meetup.com/Portlands-Techno-Activism-3rd-Mondays/pages/22681732/Code_of_Conduct/

{short} Code of Conduct Portland's Techno-Activism 3rd Mondays is dedicated to providing an informative and positive experience for everyone who participates in or supports our community, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, ability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, socioeconomic status, caste, or creed.

Our events are intended to educate and share information related to technology and activism, and anyone who is there for this purpose is welcome. Because we value the safety and security of our members and strive to have an inclusive community, we do not tolerate harassment of members or event participants in any form.

Audio and video recording are not permitted at meetings without prior approval.

Our Code of Conduct (https://www.meetup.com/Portlands-Techno-Activism-3rd-Mondays/pages/22681732/Code_of_Conduct/) applies to all events run by Portland's TA3M. Please report any incidents to the event organizer.