Turing Lecture: AI for innovative social work, Desmond U. Patton

The lockdowns due to COVID-19 have led to the expansion of our online lives – with many groups and communities flourishing in the communal spaces of social media.

But what about the most vulnerable in our society? Social inequalities have been dramatically highlighted by the necessary adjustments made for COVID-19. In this lecture we ask if AI and data science can help pinpoint the challenges faced by our growing online lives, and help us, or will it harm us in the process?

About the event
Professor Patton will explore the intersection of race, AI, empathy and social media and share how his work uses qualitative and computational data collection methods to examine the relationship between youth and gang violence and social media, and how and why violence, grief, and identity are expressed on social media.

In 2018, Professor Patton published a ground-breaking finding in Nature journal, Digital Medicine, which uncovered grief as a pathway to aggressive communication on Twitter. The report was cited in an amici curiae brief submitted to the United States Supreme Court in Elonis v. United States, which examined the interpretation of threats on social media. His lecture will explore the real-world impact these expressions have on the well-being of youth, particularly those from low-income and minority ethnic groups.