One of the central tenets of The eQuality Project is providing young people the space to share their experiences on a broad range of issues ranging from privacy and surveillance, legal issues surrounding technology-facilitated violence, to data collection and discriminatory algorithms. Much of our recent research with youth focuses on algorithmic sorting, which has led us towards the questions of what algorithms can do, what algorithms can’t do, and how they actually work.
Algorithmic discrimination casts a long shadow, and impacts the work of many of our partners and stakeholders – a diverse group of civil society groups, policymakers, educators and youth advocates. In light of this, we decided to form a panel at our virtual Annual General Meeting on December 15th 2020, featuring: Tarleton Gillespie (Principal Researcher at Microsoft New England and affiliated Associate Professor at Cornell University); Chris MacPhee (Assistant Director of The Centre for Advanced Computing at Queen’s University); and, Joanna Redden (Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information & Media Studies at The University of Western Ontario, and co-director of the Data Justice Lab) in order to shed some light on the what algorithms are and how they do/don’t work..