Junior Fellows Lecture Series: Are Ya Winning, Son?

Thursday, December 3 at 8:00 pm – 9:00 pm EST

Our amazing speakers each have 15 minutes to push this very question-marked meme to its unexpected limits. Join us to encounter new knowledge and pose winning questions to:

Monica Henderson: “Survival of the ‘bit’-est: Digital divides and digital citizenship during COVID-19.”
What commonalities do the ‘winners’ of this pandemic share? In a pre-COVID-19 world, digital access and skills divides were shown to amplify socioeconomic divides. During this pandemic, these divides have coagulated into a fathomless trench. In this talk, I illustrate some key issues for digital inclusion across scholarship and policymaking in the last few months. I then discuss growing concerns for equity and (digital) citizenship in a digitized society where only the ‘bit’-est have the digital skills and tools to survive and thrive.

Julian Posada Gutierrez: “Have Ya Automated Them, Son? The Promise and Perils of AI Ethics for the Present of Work” Current discussions on AI and labour focus on the deployment of these technologies in the workplace but ignore the essential role of human labour in their development. Current ethical principles and regulations should be more comprehensive and incorporate existing human rights frameworks to improve working conditions. This is not a ‘future of work’ problem since AI is here, and it is already impacting workers worldwide.

Gavia Lertzman-Lepofsky: “Evolution vs Ecology: which will win?”
Both evolution and ecology interact to shape the patterns of biodiversity across the globe—and this diversity can be either be ecological (number of species per area), evolutionary (number of closely related species), or some confusing tangle of both.  Add in randomness, regional effects, and climate, and this is recipe for complete research chaos.  In this presentation, I will discuss some quirks of Anolis lizard evolution that allows researchers to disentangle these issues and present some preliminary results showing how large-scale evolutionary processes can shape local community structure.

Join Zoom Meeting

https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/82632597273

Meeting ID: 826 3259 7273
Passcode: jfls