Queer in AI @ NeurIPS 2022!
About
The Queer in AI workshop at NeurIPS asks its participants to question the status quo of machine learning research and applications in society, in a world ravaged by queerphobia, heteropatriarchy, corporate hegemony, racial disparity and global economic inequality. The Queer in AI membership survey shows that nearly 70% of queer scientists are not publicly out and many have faced discrimination or even violence due to their existence. We call on our community to face these challenges head-on, to advocate for and build a future where technological progress empowers marginalized people and does not ossify the status quo of the past and present.
As such, it is imperative to bring this workshop to NeurIPS and invite all participants of the conference to reflect, discuss and build a future of equitable AI for people of all identities and backgrounds, beyond simplistic questions of the raw scale of computational resources and data. In this year’s workshop, which will be held both virtually and in-person, we want to focus in particular on the ongoing tension of ethical AI research at large corporations whose profit motives are intrinsically linked to AI, and on the impact of AI technology on people with intersectional identities, such as queer neurodiverse people and queer people of color.
Workshop Schedule and Participation Info
QueerInAI is hosting both in-person and online socials, at the affinity workshop at NeurIPS 2022. The detailed schedule is as follows:
11/28/2022: In-Person Workshop [Time Zone: CDT/CST]
*NeurIPS registration is required to attend this event.
Session - 1
09:00 - 09:15 Welcome
09:15 - 09:45 Talk: Vqueeram on ‘The possibilities and limits of intersectionality’ (Virtual)
09:45 - 10:15 Talk: Onir on ‘The Queer Gaze’ (Virtual)
10:30 - 11:30 Panel: Faculty and Queerness (Virtual)
11:30 - 12:15 Sponsor Booth Coffee Break (In-Person)
12:15- 13:30 Lunch Break
Session - 2
13:30 - 14:00 Talk: Silvia and Ana on ‘Sex and Gender in Computer Graphics Literature’ (In-Person)
14:00 - 14:30 Talk: Danica Sutherland: Name Change Policies: A Brief (Personal) Tour (In-Person)
14:45 - 15:45 Panel: Immigration and Queerness (Virtual)
15:45 - 16:30 Sponsor Networking Session (In-Person)
16:30 Onwards Joint Affinity Poster Session (In-Person)
11/29/2022: In-Person Social [Time Zone: CDT/CST]
*NeurIPS registration is not required to attend this event.
Time: 8:00 PM
Venue: QiQi, New Orleans (Directions)
12/10/2022: Virtual Workshop + Social [Time Zone: CDT/CST]
*NeurIPS registration is not required to attend this event.
More details to follow shortly!
About the Events
Talk: Vqueeram on ‘The possibilities and limits of intersectionality’ (Virtual)
About the Session: Inspired by the Combahee River Collective Statement and the pioneering essays of Prof. Kimberlé Crenshaw, this talk suggests some tentative ways to imagine a practice of intersectionality in India. Using Dr. Ambedkar’s remarkable insight into the relation between caste and sexuality, this talk will do a critical reading of Navtej Johar and NALSA judgments by the Supreme Court of India that recognised the equal rights of LGB and T persons. Instead of understanding intersectionality as a catch all solution to political problems, the talk suggests that intersectionality sometimes leaves us with an aporia.
About the Speaker: Vqueeram is a writer and teacher. They research around sex, law and the stuff of living and dying. vqueeram lives and loves in Delhi.
Talk: Onir on ‘The Queer Gaze’ (Virtual)
About the Session: Post-2019, the reading down of section 377 by the Supreme court of India various production houses and OTT decided that it was time to have some queer content. But more often than not this was not really about empowering the community but getting a tick mark on having something to do with inclusion.
What followed was a handful of films with queer narratives, mostly directed by cis men and as they put it "taking baby steps" to understand the community. What was missing was the queer community being empowered to tell their own stories, or empowering queer artists and technicians being hired to represent themselves.
About the Speaker: Born as Anirban Dhar in Samchi, Bhutan, Onir spent much of his childhood going to the cinema. Earlier, Onir studied comparative literature at Jadavpur University in 1989, he received a scholarship to study film editing at SFB/TTC in Berlin. He later returned to India and worked as an editor, scriptwriter, art director, music album producer and song/music video director. Onir recently published his memoir “I Am Onir and I Am Gay” which he has co-written with his sister Irene Dhar Malik and published by Penguin Viking. He is best known for his film “My Brother...Nikhil”, based on the life of Dominic D'Souza, starring Sanjay Suri, Juhi Chawla and Purab Kohli. It was one of the first mainstream Hindi films to deal with AIDS and same-sex relationships.
Panel: Faculty and Queerness (Virtual)
About the Panel: This panel brings together a diverse group of queer faculty to discuss their experiences in the workplace. From navigating academia to being out in their department, panelists will share experiences and lessons on the same. The panel will also include discussions on inculcating inclusivity in the classroom.
About the Panelists:
Jon Cardoso-Silva is an Assistant Professorial Lecturer at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), in the Data Science Institute, where he teaches data science, the techniques and how to reflect on their impact, to students in the social sciences. He holds a PhD in Computer Science at King's College London and his areas of interest are broad and include from optimisation algorithms, interdisciplinary complex network analysis (social, biological, political networks) and regression algorithms applied to the modelling of in-silico drug-disease efficacy.
Martin Mundt (he/him) is a junior research group leader at the Technical University of Darmstadt (TU Darmstadt) and the Hessian Center for Artificial Intelligence (hessian.AI), where he leads the Open World Lifelong Learning (OWLL) lab. He is also a board member of directors at the non-profit organization ContinualAI. Previously, he has obtained a PhD degree in computer science and an M.Sc. in physics from Goethe University.
Sara Beery will join MIT as an assistant professor in the Faculty of Artificial Intelligence and Decision-Making in EECS in September 2023 and is currently a visiting researcher at Google working on urban tree mapping across North America. She received her PhD in computing and mathematical sciences at Caltech in 2022. Her research focuses on building computer vision methods that enable global-scale environmental and biodiversity monitoring across data modalities, tackling real-world challenges including strong spatiotemporal correlations, imperfect data quality, fine-grained categories, and long-tailed distributions.
Shamini Kothari (she/they) is an instructor for the Introduction to Critical Thinking programme at Ashoka University. They teach courses on 'Intimacy and Image', 'Family and Kinship' and 'Food in Literature and Cinema'. Her interests lie at the intersections of cinema, literature culture and questions of desire and gender.
Talia Ringer is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Illinois, where their Illinois Theorem Provers lab develops tools and techniques that make it easier to formally prove the absence of costly or dangerous bugs in large and critical software systems. In doing so, their lab likes to use the whole toolbox---everything from dependent type theory to program transformations to neural proof synthesis---all in service of real humans. Talia is also the founder of the SIGPLAN long-term mentoring program (SIGPLAN-M), as well as the Computing Connections Fellowship. They are bisexual, neurodivergent, and agender. On their free time, they like to do judo, run, and play music arcade video games.
Talk: Silvia and Ana on ‘Sex and Gender in Computer Graphics Literature’ (In-Person)
About the Session: This research survey the treatment of sex and gender in the Computer Graphics research literature from an algorithmic fairness perspective. The authors conclude current trends on the use of gender in our research community are scientifically incorrect and constitute a form of algorithmic bias with potential harmful effects. The research proposes ways of addressing these trends as technical limitations.
About the Speakers:
Silvia is a fourth year Computer Science PhD student at the University of Toronto. She is advised by Alec Jacobson and working in Computer Graphics and Geometry Processing. She is a Vanier Doctoral Scholar, an Adobe Research Fellow and the winner of the 2021 University of Toronto Arts & Science Dean’s Doctoral Excellence Scholarship. She has interned twice at Adobe Research and twice at the Fields Institute of Mathematics. She is also a founder and organizer of the Toronto Geometry Colloquium and a member of WiGRAPH. She is currently looking to survey potential future postdoc and faculty positions, starting Fall 2024.
Ana Dodik is a PhD student and Presidential Fellow at MIT CSAIL working on neural representations for geometry processing. Prior to joining MIT, she spent two years developing next-generation virtual presence at Meta. She graduated with a Master’s degree from ETH Zurich, where she spent a year collaborating with Disney Research Studios on problems at the intersection of machine learning and offline rendering.
Talk: Danica Sutherland: Name Change Policies: A Brief (Personal) Tour (In-Person)
About the Session: This talk will cover the current state of name changes on previously published papers, an issue that’s particularly important for trans authors, largely through the lens of my own name change. I’ll talk about what publishers allow, how we got there, and issues with third-party tools like Google Scholar. I’ll also examine how effective all this is at getting people to actually cite you by the right name.
About the Speaker: Danica Sutherland (she/they) is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, a CIFAR AI Chair at Amii, and a trans woman. She works on representation learning (particularly with kernels), statistical testing, and learning theory.
Panel: Immigration and Queerness (Virtual)
About the Panel: Queer individuals often have unique relations to their national identity based on societal norms and political tolerance in the country. These tensions can even motivate emigration, which then results in new challenges. This panel will discuss the difficulties faced by queer individuals when moving to new countries as well as challenges faced when living in a multicultural environment.
About the Panelists:
Claas (he/him) is a graduate worker at the University of Toronto and the Vector Institute. He moved to Canada recently from Germany, lived in the US and the Philippines for a while, and is trying to figure out his life in-between his research, life and everything. He has previously organized the Queer in AI workshop at NeurIPS 2021, and socials at ICLR, CoRL and RSS.
Hetvi (she/any) is currently a PhD student based at Imperial College London, and is a part of the StatML Center for Doctoral Training (CDT). Within the CDT, one of Hetvi's broad focus areas is to learn how to use statistics to enhance our understanding of biological systems. Outside studies, Hetvi likes to organize with Queer in AI, to make or geek out about art, to quiz and to travel.
Umut (they/them) is an activist and advocate for queer and gender expansive rights with an MA in Cultural Studies and a BA in Communication Sciences. They are an activist and advocate for queer and gender expansive rights. They currently work as a researcher and consultant in AI ethics and governance. In addition, they are part of the Internet Society as head of the Gender Standing Group. They have participated as speaker and moderator at the Internet Governance Forum, the Mozilla Festival, RightsCon and other technical and digital rights conferences, focusing mainly on sessions on AI, gender and youth participation in Internet governance.
Vagrant Gautam (xe/xem and they/them) is a trans, agender, brown computer scientist and linguist. Xe is currently a PhD student at Saarland University, Germany, by way of Canada (home!), India and Singapore. Xe works broadly on problems with computers and language - speech, chatbots, generation and more, in German and English, and sometimes with neopronouns. Xyr free time is usually spent being quiet, looking at birds and dealing with gender bureaucracy.
Accepted Submissions
Multi-objective Bayesian Optimization with Heuristic Objectives for Biomedical and Molecular Data Analysis Workflows
Alina Selega, Kieran CampbellDigging into the (Internet) Archive: Examining the NSFW Model Behind the 2018 Tumblr Purge
Renata Barreto, Claudia Von Vacano, Aaron Culich
Making Intelligence: Ethics, IQ, and ML Benchmarks
Leif Hancox-Li, Borhane Blili-Hamelin
Evolving Label Usage within Generation Z when Self-Describing Sexual Orientation
Wilson Lee, J. Nicholas Hobbs
Contact Us
Email: queerinai@gmail.com
Code of Conduct
Please read the Queer in AI code of conduct, which will be strictly followed at all times. Recording (screen recording or screenshots) is prohibited. All participants are expected to maintain the confidentiality of other participants.
Information about NeurIPS safety team will be added soon, in case you need assistance before the conference with matters pertaining to the Code of Conduct or harassment, please contact the Queer in AI Safety Team. Please be assured that if you approach us, your concerns will be kept in strict confidence, and we will consult with you on any actions taken.
Organizers
Sarthak Arora (he/him) sarthakvarora@gmail.com: Sarthak is a Statistics graduate from Ramjas College, University of Delhi. His interests lie primarily at the intersection of Data Science and its application in otherwise little explored avenues of Ethics, Environment, Politics and Art in creating intuitive and impactful models of Automation. Currently he is conducting research on Fire risk Assessment using AI/ML at UC Berkeley, and working on the Climate SDG Project at the AI for Good Foundation.
Claas Voelcker (he/him) claas@voelcker.net: Claas is a graduate student at the University of Toronto and the Vector Institute. His research primarily focuses on reinforcement learning and planning approaches for robotic control. He has previously organized the Queer in AI workshop at NeurIPS 2021, and socials at ICLR, CoRL and RSS.
Ashwin (they/them) ashwin.queerinai@gmail.com: Ashwin is a queer bahujan researcher at IIIT Hyderabad and and one of the current Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Admins (DEIA) at Queer in AI. They work broadly in computational social science and AI ethics. They help organize events, draft RFI’s and are committed to developing and expanding the QueerInAI community in the global south.
Kruno Lehman (he/him) krunolp@gmail.com: Kruno is in his second year of MSc in Statistics at ETH Zürich. He is interested in Bayesian statistics, neural network theory and high-dimensional learning theory. At QueerInAI, he organizes workshops and socials at conferences.
Hang Yuan (he/him) angerhangy@gmail.com: Hang is a 3rd-year PhD student at the University of Oxford. His work mainly focuses on self-supervised learning and ML4Health. He has been involved with various ED&I activities to expand the awareness of QueerInAI in Europe and China.
Nenad Tomasev (he/him) nenadt@google.com: Nenad is a staff research scientist at DeepMind, where he was one of the original members of the Health AI team. His research lies at the intersection of theory and practice, and is aimed at developing socially responsible and fair AI systems to help address meaningful problems in the real world.
Ruchira Ray (she/her) ruchiraray99@gmail.com: Ruchira is a first-year MS student in Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. She is interested in Multimodal Learning, particularly audio-visual learning, and how it can be used in robotics to improve human-machine collaboration. She helps organize workshops/socials and assists with social outreach at QueerInAI.