Delighted to give a keynote talk at the Red Cross Nordic Skillshare summit in Helsinki, with over 200 participants from around the Nordics and Europe. In my talk, “Making Sense of Crises: Transdisciplinary Perspectives”, I shared outcomes from our work in the Crisis Narratives & Trust-M projects.
I discussed how enriching communication, cooperation, and contestation are always needed in crisis contexts, and we must critically consider the role of machine learning, AI-based technologies and participatory design to support trustworthy, contextually relevant, and humane approaches to preparing & coping with crises.
My postdoc Ali Ünlü and student researcher Amina Chahla joined me on stage to discuss our ongoing work with the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) on computational social media analysis, and an emerging collaboration with the Finnish Red Cross – Suomen Punainen Risti on predictive analytics for volunteer matching. Our talk was really well received and discussions continued over lunch with several parallel workshops on data analytics and AI ethics.
Lets hope this leads to some interesting collaborative directions with the Red Cross on humanitarian research and crisis informatics, a new research area our group hopes to begin developing, with my postdoc Fedor Vitiugin leading the initiative in coming months at the Aalto University Department of Computer Science. If you’re interested, feel free to reach out to us.
Presentation for Finnish Red Cross:
Nitin Sawhney 