Fleur Johns
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Fleur Johns is Professor of Law at UNSW Sydney and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, working in the fields of international law, legal theory, law and society, and law and technology. Fleur is a graduate of Melbourne University (BA, LLB(Hons)) and Harvard University (LLM, SJD; Menzies Scholar; Laylin Prize). Her publications include four books: The Mekong: A Socio-legal Approach to River Basin Development (Routledge, 2016, with co-authors Boer, Hirsch, Saul and Scurrah); Non-Legality in International Law: Unruly Law (Cambridge, 2013); Events: The Force of International Law (Routledge, 2011, with co-editors Joyce and Pahuja); and International Legal Personality (Ashgate, 2010). |
Friedhelm Weinberg
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Friedhelm Weinberg is the Executive Director of HURIDOCS, an organization that helps human rights defenders utilize information and technology to shine a light on abuses and advance justice for both victims and perpetrators of human rights violations. In 2019, HURIDOCS was awarded the Google AI Impact Challenge, a grant of 1 million USD to recognize and further HURIDOCS’ pioneering work to leverage artificial intelligence for human rights defenders. In 2017, Friedhelm was awarded with the Open Society Foundations’ New Executives Fund. |
Lecture 1: #Help? The Ethics of Assessing and Addressing Humanitarian Needs Digitally
Like many other areas of work, international humanitarian practice is being transformed by the influx of digital technology. Institutional developments within the United Nations (UN) are telling. Just over ten years ago, the UN Secretary General announced the launch of the UN Global Pulse project, dedicating to enabling, showcasing and promoting the “scaled adoption of big data innovation for sustainable development and humanitarian action”. This project has since advanced alongside other comparable initiatives throughout the UN system. This talk will reflect on some of the ethical challenges that the digital mediation of humanitarian practice provokes, drawing upon the speaker’s socio-legal research, ongoing for several years, that has focused on the work of Pulse Lab Jakarta (part of UN Global Pulse) and its collaborators.
Lecture 2: Can and should algorithms interpret human rights decisions?
The power of information lies in its accessibility to the people who can act on it. When it comes to human rights, those people are the advocates, activists, researchers and policy makers working to make sure that everyone’s basic dignity and freedoms are protected. But making information accessible is a very time-consuming process, in which the humans curating collections are prone to making errors due to fatigue and misinterpretation. Can machine learning help to support? This talk will engage with the possibility of using these new technologies in the human rights field, and engage with the questions around representation, bias and misunderstandings in human-computer interaction that arise.