Former CCC Council member, Suresh Venkatasubramanian, was recently featured in Fast Company article “How Suresh Venkatasubramanian helped write the White House’s framework for AI governance”.

In 2021, Venkatasubramanian joined the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) as its assistant director for science and justice to think through all the risks that automation poses and limits that should be imposed on the technology.

As part of his job, Venkatasubramanian coauthored the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, a broad framework for protecting people’s rights in the world of AI. Released last October, the Blueprint has had tangible effects on White House actions.

Earlier this year, one section of the blueprint that defines algorithmic discrimination appeared almost verbatim in a White House executive order on advancing racial equity. – Fast Company Article

In August, Venkatasubramanian left the White House for a director position at Brown University’s Center for Technological Responsibility, Reimagination, and Redesign (CNTR). His next goal is to move “beyond critique” of existing technology and toward new ways of building technology in the first place. That means rather than building tools and dealing with their unintended consequences on at-risk communities later, students are challenged to imagine ways to build technology for those communities.

Related to this new direction, Venkatasubramanian, was an organzier of a recent CCC workshop Community-Driven Approaches to Research in Technology & Society. The focus of this visioning activity is to catalyze the research community by enabling conversations between computing researchers and those that are impacted by artificial intelligence systems. Through active participation, we hope all will better understand the research opportunities that will create improved systems for the users who are impacted by the systems. Participatory research is a growing area in computing, and we also plan to outline how community partners and researchers can effectively and ethically work together to conduct community-driven research. Be on the lookout for a workshop report summarizing key findings within teh next couple of months.

You can read the full Fast Company article here.