Dr. Tijana Milosevic is an Assistant professor at UCD School of Information and Communication Studies (ICS). Her main research topic is human dignity and how this value is produced and lived in everyday life, both digitally and offline. Tijana’s main area of study is children and young people’s digital media use and how it impacts their wellbeing; as well as exposure to online risks, such as cyberbullying. She has also studied online intermediation and digital media policy. She regularly engages in online safety-related policy consultations, engages with the media and has provided expert evidence in front of Irish parliamentary committees. Tijana has published over 20 academic articles in interdisciplinary journals such as New Media & Society, Social Media & Society and International Journal of Communication, among others, and she is also the author of “Protecting Children Online: Cyberbullying Policies of Social Media Companies” (MIT Press, 2018). She is currently a member of the Pool of European Youth Researchers, a joint initiative of the Council of Europe and European Commission.

Dikwal-Bot, D., & Mendes, K. (2022). “Eight Tory Leadership candidates declare themselves feminitsts”: feminism and political campaigs. Feminist Media Studies, 1-17

Mendes, K., & Dikwal-Bot, B. (2022). Social Media and Political Campaigns: Justin Trudeau and Sadiq Khan. In D. Taras., & Davis, R. (Eds.), Electoral Campaigns, Media, and the New World of Digital Politics (pp. 60-82). University of Michigan Press

Dikwal-Bot, D. (2019). Feminist activism and digital networks: bewteen empowerment and vulnerability. Feminist Media Studies, 19(3), 458-462

Naoise McNally is a PhD Researcher at ML-Labs (SFI Centre for Research Training in Machine Learning) and the School of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin, under the supervision of Dr. Susan Leavy and Dr. Marco Bastos. She has over 15 years experience founding and leading start-ups in the tech industry in Ireland, specialising in the areas of digital publishing, online marketing and multi-sided advertising platforms. Her research centres on social media recommender systems, examining questions of algorithmic governance with a focus on methods of investigating systemic risk.

Dr. Bernd Justin Jütte is an Assistant Professor in Intellectual Property Law at UCD’s Sutherland School of Law. He directs the LLM in Intellectual property and Information Technology Law and currently serves as the Vice Principal For Globalisation at the College of Social Sciences and Law. Justin teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Copyright and Patent Law.

Justin’s research interest centre around digital aspects of copyright law, in particular at the intersection of copyright exceptions and fundamental rights. and the regulation of online speech on platforms through copyright norms and other normative frameworks. In the larger framework of digital constitutionalism, Justin has been involved in the ‘Right to Research in International Copyright Law’ project, coordinated by the American University Washington College of Law and is currently working with a group of Researchers steered by the Institute for Information Law at the University of Amsterdam on a project on ‘New Media Law’.

Justin is an appointed Senior Researcher at Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania and is member of the European Policy for Intellectual Property Association and the International Association For The Advancement Of Teaching And Research In Intellectual Property. He has taught internationally including in Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Portugal and Cyprus covering subjects such as Internet Law and Sports Law.

Recent publications:

Fiil-Flynn, S.M., Butler, B., Carroll, M., Cohen-Sasson, O., Craig, C., Guibault. L., Jaszi, P., Jutte, B.J., Katz, A., Quintais. J.P., Margoni, T., de Souza, A.R., Sag, M., Samberg, R., Schirru, L., Senftleben, M., Tur-Sinai, O., & Contreras, J.L. (2022). Legal reform to enhance global text and data mining research. Science, 378, 951-953

Jütte, B. J., La Diega, G. N., Priora, G., & Salza, G. (2022). Zooming in on Education: An empirical study on digital platforms and copyright in the United Kingdom, Italy and the Netherlands. European Journal of Law and Technology, 13(2), 

Jütte, B. J., & Priora, G. (2022). CJEU rejects Poland’s challenge to preventive upload filtering to combat copyright infringement on online platforms. Forthcoming in EIPR (2022)

Lai Ma is Assistant Professor at UCD School of Information and Communication Studies. Her current project examines the development of open research infrastructure and the platformisation of research information using concepts and approaches in history and sociology of knowledge, research on research (or meta-research) and science and technology studies. She has published in Journal of Documentation, Journal of Association for Information Science and Technology, Research Evaluation, and Science and Public Policy.

Recent publications:

Ma, L. (2023). Information, platformized. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 74(2), 273-282. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24713

Ma, L. (2022). Metrics and epistemic injustice. Journal of Documentation, 78(7), 392-404. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-12-2021-0240

Ma, L., & Agnew, R. (2022). Deconstructing impact: A framework for impact evaluation in grant applications. Science and Public Policy, 49(2), 289-301 https://doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scab080

Abeba Birhane is a cognitive scientist, currently a Senior Advisor in AI Accountability at the Mozilla Foundation and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College Dublin (working with Trinity’s Complex Software Lab).

She researches human behaviour, social systems, and responsible and ethical artificial intelligence and was recently appointed to the UN’s Advisory Body on AI. Abeba works at the intersection of complex adaptive systems, machine learning, algorithmic bias, and critical race studies. In her present work, Abeba examines the challenges and pitfalls of computational models and datasets from a conceptual, empirical, and critical perspective.

Abeba Birhane has a PhD in cognitive science at the School of Computer Science, UCD, and Lero, The Irish Software Research Centre. Her interdisciplinary research focused on the dynamic and reciprocal relationship between ubiquitous technologies, personhood, and society. Specifically, she explored how ubiquitous technologies constitute and shape what it means to be a person through the lenses of embodied cognitive science, complexity science, and critical data studies.

Her work with Vinay Prabhu uncovered that large-scale image datasets commonly used to develop AI systems, including ImageNet and 80 Million Tiny Images, carried racist and misogynistic labels and offensive images. She has been recognised by VentureBeat as a top innovator in computer vision.

Recent publications:

Birhane, A., Isaac, W., Prabhakaran, V., Diaz, M., Elish, M. C., Gabriel, I., & Mohamed, S. (2022). Power to the People? Opportunities and Challenges for Participatory AI. EAAMO ’22: Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization(6), 1-8

Newman, S., Birhane, A., Zajko, M., Osoba, O. A., Prunkl, C. Lima, G., et al. (2019). AI & Agency. UCLA: The Program on Understanding Law, Science, and Evidence (PULSE).https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8q15786s 

Dr. Susan Leavy is an assistant professor at the School of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin and a funded investigator with Insight Centre for Data Analytics. Her research areas concern artificial intelligence, ethics, natural language processing and cultural analytics. Her recent work has focused on mitigating bias and discrimination in natural language processing and developing ethical frameworks for AI, founded in human rights and theories of social justice.

Susan earned a PhD in Computer Science at Trinity College Dublin, where she focused on uncovering gender bias in news coverage with machine learning. She also holds an MPhil in Gender and Women’s Studies (TCD), an MSc in Artificial Intelligence (Edinburgh University) and a BA in English and Philosophy (UCD). She worked internationally, managing the design and development of large-scale trading platforms in the finance sector. Susan is passionate about increasing diversity in those who design and develop AI systems.

Recent publications:

Leavy, S. (2022). Inclusive Ethical Design for Recommender Systems. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Responsible Recommendation. (FAccTRec)

Bartl, M., Leavy, S. (2022). Towards Lexical Gender Inference: A Scalable Methodology using Online Databases. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. Association for Computational Linguistics, Dublin, Ireland. pp. 47-58

Leavy S., Siapera E., O’Sullivan B. (2021). Ethical Data Curation for AI: An Approach based on Feminist Epistemology and Critical Theories of Race. In Proceedings of the 2021 AAAI/ACM

Brendan is an assistant professor at the School of Information and Communication Studies in UCD. Brendan has always had a strong interest in the factors that impact human judgement of information. From a disciplinary perspective, his work is at the intersection of HCI, Behavioural Science, Information Science and News and Journalism studies. Traditionally, his work has focused on bias and credibility, but more recently it has focused on misinformation and disinformation. Due to world events and the proliferation and threat of disinformation, much of his work is now undertaken within the security domain.

Brendan is currently the PI of a Horizon Europe Innovation Action project, called VIGILANT. It is a 3-year, €4m project with 18 partners that will equip European Police Authorities with advanced technologies from academia to detect and analyse disinformation campaigns that lead to criminal activities. Brendan completed his PhD in the ADAPT Centre in the School of Computer Science and Statistics in Trinity College Dublin under Professor Vincent Wade and the late Professor Séamus Lawless. His PhD investigated the impact of visual presentation of news on the perception of bias. After completing his PhD, he held three concurrent positions as a Postdoctoral researcher on the
H2020 Provenance project developing tools to detect disinformation, an IRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow on a two-year project focused on credibility and disinformation, and as a research fellow on the Proactive Experiences and Agency challenge in the Digitally Enhanced Engagement Strand (PEA@DEE), in the ADAPT Centre.

Recent publications:

Kocaballi, A. B., Sezgin, E., Clark, L., Carroll, J. M., Huang, Y., Huh-Yoo, J., Kim, J., Rafal Kocielnik, R., Lee, Y., Mamykina, L., Mitchell, E. G., Moore, R. J., Murali, P.,  Mynatt, E. D., Park, S., Pasta, A., Richards, D., Silva, L. M., Smriti, D., Spillane, B., Zhang, Z., Zubatiy, T. (2022). Design and evaluation of challenges of conversational agents in health care and well-being: selective review study. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 24(11), e38525

Conlan, O., Suiter, J., Yousuf, B., Qureshi, M. A., Spillane, B., Munnelly, G., Carroll, O., Runswick, M., Park, K., Culloty, E. (2021). PROVENANCE: An Intermediary-Free Solution for Digital Content Verification. KDAH Workshop at 30th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management 

Spillane, B., Lawless, S., & Wade, V. (2020). The impact of increasing and decreasing the professionalism of news webpage aesthetics on the perception of bias in news articles. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference On Human-Computer Interaction (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)

Maria O’Brien works as a lecturer in Queen’s University Belfast. Her research focuses on multiple aspects of cultural and creative industry policies. Maria’s research has been focused on the field of political economy of the audiovisual industries in Ireland and the EU. Her doctoral research on the political economy of tax incentives for the audiovisual industries was completed in Dublin City University, School of Communications, in 2020.