CIS Seminar: ” Just Infrastructures”

 Dr. Karrie Karahalios is a University Scholar and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois where she directs the Social Spaces Group, co-directs of the Center for Just Infrastructures and co-leads the Community Data Clinic. She holds affiliate professorships in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the School of Information Sciences, and the Coordinated Science Laboratory. Dr. Karahalios’s research focuses on AI and community-centered computing. She studies and builds socio-technical systems in the domains of algorithm justice, algorithmically-mediated social media feeds, content-moderation systems, accessibility, group dynamics, and smart infrastructures to name a few. She, with her colleagues introduced the concept of Algorithm Audits, and in 2016, she was one of several plaintiffs on a suit filed by the ACLU against the US Attorney General arguing that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) is unconstitutional because it criminalizes audit testing research on algorithms that perpetuate discrimination based on race and gender, especially in housing and employment.

She has received a Faculty Early-Career Development Award from the US National Science Foundation (NSF CAREER) in the area of human-centered computing, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, a Kavli Fellowship, the A. Richard Newton Breakthrough Research Award, among others.  Her work has been recognized as the best in the field in the premiere Human Computer Interaction conference (ACM’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)), the premiere Social Computing Conference (ACM’s Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)), and in a leading international forum for database researchers (ACM’s International Conference on Management Data (SIGMOD)). She is currently the chair of the CSCW steering committee, and actively participates in program committees for research conferences in social computing, social media mining, and human computer interaction (CHI, CSCW, FAT*, World Wide Web (WWW)).