bios
Speaker’s Bio:
Stephanie Dick is an expert on AI and a historian of mathematics and technology. For over fifteen years, she has explored what AI is, what it does, and how its use is changing our world, our work, and ourselves. In a time of rapid change and rampant hype, she offers a sober and highly credible assessment of new technologies for businesses, professionals, government agencies, and interested communities. Stephanie’s award-winning scholarship explores how the use of computing and AI changes how and what we know and from this perspective she guides audiences in appreciating what kind of “intelligence” AI offers and how it relates to our own. AI invites us to ask the deepest questions about ourselves and our world, and Stephanie inspires people to ask them while also offering clarity about AI in practical terms.
Academic Bio:
Stephanie Dick is Assistant Professor of Communication at Simon Fraser University. She is an historian of science and technology, focused on how mathematics, computing, and artificial intelligence shape knowledge, labour, and power in the twentieth century. Her first book, Making Up Minds: Computing and Proof in the Postwar United States, explores attempts to automate mathematical intelligence in the twentieth century and the theories of mind that informed these efforts. Her second large research project explores the history of policing and police uses of technology, especially the establishment of the first centralized law enforcement databanks in the 1960s, the political and technological construction of ‘criminality’ within them. She is editor, with Janet Abbate, of Abstractions and Embodiments: New Histories of Computing and Society.
Stephanie is a Co-PI on the Data Fluencies Grant at the Digital Democracies Institute; she co-edits the “Mining the Past” column at the Harvard Data Science Review; serves on the Editorial Board of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing; she is a Fellow with the Dialogue on Technology Project at SFU’s Centre for Dialogue; she was a co-organizer on the Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Histories of AI: A Genealogy of Power” at the University of Cambridge and before joining the faculty at SFU, she was an Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and a Junior Fellow with the Harvard Society of Fellows.
