The LINCS/LINAS Seminar series is student-led and organised by Dr Meg Schwamb and doctoral scholars, Anna Montgomery and James Sweeney. We would love it if as many of you as possible could join us for this seminar. Refreshments will also be provided!

The speakers for this Seminar will be:

James Sweeney, a first year LINAS doctoral scholar, will be presenting a paper titled ‘Talking Technologies – How safe is our voice?’

Abstract – The ‘Talking Technologies’ LINAS Project accepts a main premise – the age of the keyboard as our main interface of interaction with the cyber world is coming to an end. We are starting to shift to the use of our voice for making these interactions. This is being done through ‘Intelligent Voice Assistants’ such as Siri, Alexa and Cortana which are built into many of the smart devices we own. This evolution is not without risk or issues, there is constant eaves-mining, data privacy issues and security threats, all of which will only escalate as our reliance on these voices increases.   

Mariana Janot, a third year PhD in Interinstitutional Graduate Program in International Relations “San Tiago Dantas” (UNESP, UNICAMP, PUC-SP), a friend of LINAS and Visiting Student in School of HAPP, will be presenting a paper titled ‘Experimenting with Drones in the Global South’  

Abstract - Drones have been a significant feature in the security field over the past few decades. From a critical perspective, this presentation explores how these devices are deployed within Global South dynamics, where many countries are often considered to be testing grounds for their designs, and local security professionals hope to acquire them in an attempt to follow security trends. It will focus on Brazil’s current scenario of military experimentation with drone usage for domestic operations’ surveillance while interrogating its possibilities of further linkage with AI for automated flights and operating, as well as its weaponizing outcomes. 

Stanley Simoes, - a second year PhD student in the School of EEECS and a Friend of LINAS, will be presenting a paper titled ‘Towards group fairness in clustering’ 

Abstract: Fairness in machine learning has seen much scholarly activity in recent times. Within the broader umbrella of fair ML, several fair clustering algorithms have been developed. Most of these endeavours have considered ensuring fairness within each cluster through proportional representation of sensitive groups (such as those defined on race and gender). In a departure from this thread, another more recent thread of research within the centroid-based clustering paradigm has sought to deepen the uniformity of distance-to-cluster-centroid across all sensitive groups. The existing work in this thread, however, suffers from deep levels of intra-cluster unfairness. Towards addressing this limitation, we propose a novel formulation of group fairness that optimises for cluster-level group fairness with respect to cluster centroids.