Algorithmic Accountability Reporting - Public Lecture

Algorithms are coming to adjudicate decisions in nearly all facets of the public and private sectors. But despite the potential for efficiency gains, algorithms fed by big data can also amplify structural discrimination or produce errors that deny services to individuals – the close monitoring of such systems is of increasing importance. Algorithmic accountability reporting is a new form of journalism that is emerging to apply the core journalistic functions of watchdogging and investigative reporting to algorithms. In this talk Diakopoulos will discuss how algorithmic accountability reporting is used by journalists as a method for articulating the power structures, biases, and influences that computational artifacts play in society.

Speaker: Nicholas Diakopoulos is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at Northwestern University where he is Director of the Computational Journalism Lab (CJL). He is a Tow Fellow at Columbia University School of Journalism as well as Associate Professor II at the University of Bergen Department of Information Science and Media Studies. His research is in computational journalism, including how news work is done with, by, and about algorithms, which is the topic of his forthcoming book, “Automating the News: How Algorithms are Rewriting the Media”. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech where he co-founded the program in Computational Journalism.

Sponsored by: This free public lecture is sponsored by the MSc in Computational and Data Journalism, a cutting-edge interdisciplinary programme for training newsroom developers and data journalists.