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2025 ADM+S Symposium – Automated Social Services: Building Inclusive Digital Futures
July 1 - July 3
This Symposium unites ADM+S researchers, technologists, social service professionals, and policymakers to showcase innovative responses to the challenges of building inclusive, ethical, and responsible automated social services.
Social services provide benefits to the whole community by improving outcomes for diverse and disadvantaged people through education, health and housing. Often social services are targeted to respond to people experiencing poverty, child neglect or harm, domestic and family violence, migration and settlement, homelessness and disability, the effects of disaster and many other situations. Social services are delivered by a range of actors in the community including governments, the not-for-profit sector, social enterprises and business and have sought to innovate through data-driven systems and increasingly automated technologies. As such social services mediate engagement with highly diverse people and populations, often experiencing complex circumstances of disadvantage or discrimination, and often digitally excluded.
Automation in social services is highly diverse and at very different stages of development reflecting resourcing differences across government and the voluntary not-for-profit community sector. Despite the sensitivities of social services, automation offers increased capacity and enhanced personalisation amidst growing demands within constrained resources. There is extensive interest in the potential of both predictive and generative AI. Observers have long pointed to the tensions between the objectives of improving efficiency and providing care and support to individuals, families and communities. Increasing surveillance and reduction of human connections have too often led to growing inequalities. Even well intentioned systems have unintentionally caused harm.
In the wake of nation-scale failures like Robodebt, approaches to social service automation remain cautious. Social service providers want greater legal and regulatory clarity alongside professional upskilling to help them develop and deploy data- and AI-driven technologies ethically, safely and responsibly. Calls for authentic co-design of algorithmic-enabled services with service users provides a further challenge to building cross-professional work. But the pace of change in the sector presents considerable difficulties for research, governance and regulation.
These are fundamental issues for Automated Decision Making and Society, inviting collaboration across technical, legal and social science disciplines with the government and not-for-profit sector and the community members most affected.
Symposium Location and Program
The Symposium will be held at the University of Queensland’s St Lucia campus, in Brisbane. Many sessions will be offered in hybrid mode.
- Tuesday 1 July 2025: Satellite events, HDR/ECR workshop, CI meetings & welcome event
- Wednesday 2 July 2025: Main 2025 Symposium: Automated Social Services – Building Inclusive Digital Futures
- Thursday 3 July 2025: ADM+S Centre Signature Projects Workshops. (Limited to ADM+S members and partners only.)
