Keynote talk by Associate Professor Jahna Otterbacher at the International Conference of Photography and Theory (ICPT 2022)

Dr Jahna Otterbacher, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Pure and Applied Sciences of the Open University of Cyprus, is a keynote speaker at the International Conference of Photography and Theory (ICPT 2022) held in Nicosia/Cyprus on November 17-19, 2022. The title of her talk is: “You can’t find it if you can’t “see” it: Reflections on algorithmic mediation in the distribution and reception of photographic images”.

Computer Vision tools, such as those that recognize objects or even human attributes (e.g., gender, emotion) in input images, have become pervasive in our information ecosystem. Widely used in commercial applications, the Web, and social media, they enable functionality that users take for granted, such as searching and retrieving images in real time. However, beyond the benefits, these algorithms also mediate how users perceive the nature of social reality and the information landscape. In this talk, Dr Otterbacher will share her team’s research on auditing proprietary computer vision tools to understand their biases, focusing on photographic images of people. Studies conducted by the Cyprus Center for Algorithmic Transparency, which Dr Otterbacher leads, and fAIre at CYENS Centre of Excellence, which she co-leads, demonstrate that the tools exhibit systematic social biases, usually at the expense of women and people of color, which may lead to the enhanced circulation of people-images that conform to social stereotypes, as compared to those that are more unconventional.