AI and Inequality: How Machines Keep Us Poor, Sick, and Discriminated Against

The Library Foundation of Los Angeles presents this third program in its AI series, featuring Rutgers Global Health Institute core faculty member Charles Senteio among the panelists. The event will be livestreamed at 7 p.m. Pacific time (4 p.m. Eastern).

This event will focus on the critical issue of inherent biases in AI technologies, especially as they are deployed in law enforcement, healthcare, government, and education. It will explore how these biases manifest and their profound implications.

The program will be curated and moderated by Dr. Avriel Epps, featuring Meredith Broussard, Virginia Eubanks, and Charles Senteio.

Avriel Epps is a computational social scientist and a Civic Science Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cornell University CATLab. Her work, supported by the National Center on Race and Digital Justice, Roddenberry Fellowship, and The OpEd Project, delves into how bias in predictive technologies affects adolescent racial, gender, and sociopolitical identity development. Focusing on algorithmic bias and fairness, Epps has spoken at various venues including tech giants like Google and TikTok, and for The U.S. Courts. Her scholarship has not only appeared in academic journals and handbooks but has also reached wider audiences through publications like The Atlantic and the Emmy nominated PBS documentary “TikTok, Boom.” Recently, she completed her Ph.D. at Harvard University in Education with a concentration in Human Development and will begin her tenure as Assistant Professor of Fair and Responsible Data Science at Rutgers University in Fall of 2025.

Meredith Broussard is an associate professor at New York University. Her books include More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech, and Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. She appears in the Emmy-nominated documentary “Coded Bias” on Netflix.

Virginia Eubanks is an associate professor of political science at the University at Albany, SUNY. She is the author of Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. Her investigative reporting and personal essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Scientific American, The Nation, Harper’s, and Wired. She is currently working on a memoir about community violence, PTSD, and caregiving. With Andrea Quijada, she is gathering oral histories of the global automated welfare state for Voice of Witness. She lives in Troy, New York.

Charles Senteio is a health informatics researcher focused on improving chronic disease outcomes for underserved populations. He is an associate professor at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information in the Department of Library and Information Science and a core faculty member of Rutgers Global Health Institute. His community-based research endeavors to improve outcomes for underserved patients using both existing technology (i.e., smartphones, tablets) and emerging technology (i.e., machine learning). Currently, his research is investigating how patients’ perceptions (e.g., perceived trustworthiness of providers, acculturation) influence behaviors known to impact outcomes (e.g., attendance at primary care appointments, cancer screenings, etc.).

Mark Taper Auditorium-Central Library and via Livestream

Register for free access to the Livestream on the Library Foundation of Los Angeles website.