Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Links

• Event link: https://pophealthanalytics.com/events/Registration link: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/big-tech-data-science-algorithms-and-blacklife-tickets-136882016797

Universities globally are increasingly involved with private corporations. For example, universities develop and help commercialize technology. They also collect, use, and commercialize data, often in partnership with health care and public health.

The incentives to commercialize data and the ever increasing exposure of personal data to AI-enabled algorithms poses risks to everyone, with specific threats facing BlackLife across Canada, the US and globally. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Tech workers across sectors and workplaces are rising up, enacting constructive approaches.

We can choose to leave behind the “business as usual” approach of big-tech, AI, and big data applications that impact population health – an approach that all too often harms the very people and populations it claims to help.

This session will explore the opportunities and challenges that data science, and the confluence of corporatization, big tech, and the university pose to BlackLife.

We will also identify the important contributions and gaps to be filled by data scientists, bioinformaticists, epidemiologists, clinicians, academics, policy makers, and university, health care and public health decision-makers who are willing to make a difference now and in the future.

Join us virtually for this interdisciplinary, ground-breaking and long overdue dialogue with thought leaders and actors blazing the way.

Format
Laura Rosella will introduce the Keynote speaker, Rinaldo Walcott. Following the keynote, Ruha Benjamin, LLana James, and Patricia O’Campo will introduce their own work, and respond to the keynote based on their areas of expertise. The discussion will be structured by questions developed collaboratively by event organizers, including moderator Jo-Ann Osei-Twum and a knowledge translation expert drawing on the contemporary academic literature, public discourse, and current discipline-specific concerns.

Laura Rosella is the Principal Investigator and Scientific Director of the Population Health Analytics Lab. She is an Associate Professor in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto, Faculty Member in the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and holds a scientific appointment at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES). She also holds a Canada Research Chair in Population Health Analytics, Tier 2, and is the Stephen Family Research Chair in Community Health at the Institute for Better Health, Trillium Health Partners. Her research interests include population health, population-based risk tools to support public health planning, and public health policy.

Keynote:
Rinaldo Walcott is a professor of Black diaspora cultural studies at the University of Toronto. Rinaldo’s research is founded in a philosophical orientation that is concerned with the ways in which coloniality shapes human relations across social and cultural time and focuses on Black cultural politics; histories of colonialism in the Americas, multiculturalism, citizenship, and diaspora; gender and sexuality; and social, cultural, and public policy. He is author of BlackLife: Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom (2019), Black Like Who 20th Anniversary Edition (2018), Queer Returns (2016), Counselling Across and Beyond Cultures: Exploring the work of Clemmont E Vontress in Clinical Practice by Roy Moodley and Rinaldo Walcott (2010), Rude (2003) and numerous peer reviewed articles.

Discussants:
Ruha Benjamin is an Associate Professor of African American studies at Princeton University. She is the founder of the Just Data Lab. Dr Benjamin specializes in the interdisciplinary study of science, medicine, and technology; race-ethnicity and gender; knowledge and power. She is author of People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford University Press 2013), Race After Technology (Polity 2019), and editor of Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (Duke University Press 2019), as well as numerous articles and book chapters.

LLana James is a public intellectual and scientist. Her career spans the private sector and public service. She examines how AI disrupts the practice of health care, and medicine, while increasingly redefining rehabilitation, public health and health care systems. Her research focuses on the intersection of race-ethnicity, health, data privacy, AI and the law. She is a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto, completing her PhD in the Faculty of Medicine.

Pat O’Campo is internationally renowned for her scholarship and methods development in social epidemiology, and has received career-excellence awards from the US Centers for Disease Control, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Public Health Association, and the US Institute of Medicine. Her research focuses include mental health, intimate-partner violence, children’s wellbeing, HIV prevention, infant-mortality prevention and homelessness. Dr O’Campo is a Canada Research Chair in Population Health Intervention Research, Tier 1.