New ADM+S Project Film: Automation and Public Space
Author Natalie Campbell
Date 22 May 2024
On Wednesday 22 May the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society released the first short-film in a new outreach series providing a look into the inner workings of research projects underway at the Centre.
The ADM+S Project Films initiative will span across ongoing phase 1 and phase 2 projects, highlighting the breadth of topics covered across the four focus areas, disciplines, institutions and researchers.
How is Automation Impacting Public and Shared Space? based on the ADM+S project Automation and Public Space, features project co-lead AI Michael Richardson alongside Research Fellow Thao Phan, CI Jake Goldenfein, Affiliate Andrew Brooks and PhD Student Zoe Horn, who provide critical insights into their work on Drone Delivery, Automated Crowd Control, and Digital Twins.
The film identifies key research questions, methodologies and findings so far, including:
- Research participants in our testbed project tell us that drone delivery is a convenient solution to traffic congestion, unsafe roads and poor public transport. But if the success of this new marketplace relies on the failures of local infrastructure, what are commercial actors really investing in?
- Predictive policing tools using AI and machine learning are often presented as neutral and objective solutions to the problem of the crowd. However, issues arise when the models are trained on existing police data that may already contain discriminatory bias.
- Digital Twins allow you to transform a space, environment or process via a feedback loop of sensors between the real and the virtual, and these hidden systems are often informing the ecological, economic, social and cultural decisions that govern everyday life and space.
The speed at which these technologies are emerging means that many are under regulated and require a great deal of regulatory modernisation.
The multidisciplinary and cross-institutional project team at ADM+S is working to understand how automated spatiality leads to the reconfiguring of public space, how commercial operators like digital platforms are mediating our experience of shared space, and how policy settings, industrial demands and defence priorities shape the development and application of automated technologies.
