Recognising ADM+S Researchers for International Women’s Day 2023
Author Natalie Campbell
Date 8 March 2023
The ADM+S Centre is celebrating International Women’s Day 2023 by recognising the work of some of our fantastic community members working in the fields of STEM, AI, and ADM research.
The UN’s 2023 theme of ‘DigitALL: Innovation and Technology for Gender Equality’, aims to highlight how women are disproportionately affected by the negative effects of emerging digital technologies, and advocate for change in this area.
At ADM+S, we recognise that racism, colonialism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism are principal obstacles to equity, diversity and inclusion, and remain primary causes of injustice and inequality. We believe that gender equality for all means equality for marginalised groups, and that the cause of gender equality includes the experiences of Indigenous and POC women, and transgender and non-binary people.
Today, we highlight some of the interdisciplinary researchers and students at ADM+S researching representation, women in AI, gender-based violence, and more.
Lesley Luo, PhD Candidate | Swinburne University
Le’s research aims to explore whether and how YouTube’s queer content producers and audience represent and recognise their gender identities and sexualities within narrative content. Proposed methods include content analyses of YouTube content and comments, and interviews with content producers. Key areas of focus include cross-cultural and cross-platform negotiations of queer visibility; and whether and how platform recommender systems impact on producers and audiences as they negotiate representation practices.
Marwah’s research seeks to investigate ways to understand the variability of users and quantify its impact on search engines’ retrieval effectiveness, particularly in the context of complex answer retrieval. That is, given the same information need, how variable user queries are, and how robust answer retrieval models are in response to that variability. It seeks to further understand how model effectiveness is linked to different query properties.
During the first year of her Ph.D., she was awarded the industry impact award at CReD’22 for her poster titled “In Search for Answers: User Variability and Retrieval Consistency”. She published and presented my research at the Doctoral Consortium at SIGIR’22 held in Madrid (a top-tier Information Retrieval conference). She also enjoys a bit of a challenge outside her thesis. With her team, she won first place in the AI for Mental Health Datathon co-organized by RMIT and Cogniant and she had ‘an unusual’ go at communicating her research through baking her Ph.D. for the “Bake your Ph.D.” competition.
Trang’s research sits at the intersection of media technologies, feminism, space/place, and datafication. Her current project looks at data-driven solutions to women’s safety in public space, asking how these reconfigure our understanding of space and what this might mean for the feminist struggle for spatial justice.
Recent Publications
Crowdsourcing Women’s Experiences of Space: Empowerment, (In)Visibility, and Exclusions -A Critical Reading of Safetipin Map
Upcoming Presentations
Trang will be presenting at the upcoming Algorithms for Her? 2 conference. The presentation is titled “Tracking gender balance: What are the problems represented to be?”. The paper examines gender balance trackers that use machine learning techniques such as natural language processing and image recognition to rate how balanced media content, be it a news article or an ad, is, in terms of their representation of women.
Trang has also received a travel grant to Monash University Prato in Italy in June 2023 to attend a writing and publishing workshop. For this workshop, she will be working on one of her thesis chapters and learning the skills to adapt a thesis chapter into a journal article.
Lucinda’s PhD project examines the way misogyny manifests in ordinary, everyday language in discourses around gender-based violence on social media platforms. She is looking at the response to the Depp v Heard defamation trial as a case study. Lucinda is particularly interested in the ways that notions of due process and rational debate are used to mask and deny misogynistic beliefs and behaviours.
Thao Phan is a feminist technoscience researcher who specialises in the study of gender and race in algorithmic culture.
Recent Publications
Amazon Echo and the Aesethetics of Whiteness (Winner of the 2019 Nicholas C. Mullins Award and Australian Women and Gender Studies Most Distinguished Paper Award)
The Materiality of the Digital and the Gendered Voice of Siri
Programming gender: surveillance, identity, and paranoia in Ex Machina
Recent and Upcoming Presentations
Thao recently gave the closing lecture Listening to Misrecognition as part of the Data Relations summer school at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.
Thao is also giving talks in April at the UQ Fitter, Happier, more Productive symposium and the ADM+S Automated Space workshop.
Cecily Klim, PhD Candidate | UNSW Sydney
Cecily Klim (she/her) is a CoE ADM+S PhD student at UNSW under the supervision of Professor Deborah Lupton. She has a BA(Hons) in Sustainable Development from The University of Edinburgh, and an MA in Visual Anthropology and MSc in Social Research, both from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her academic background has provided a springboard from which to explore STS, feminist theory, and the sociology of health with an interdisciplinary and future-oriented logic. Cecily is particularly interested in the politics of representation and, having worked with film, sound, storytelling, and arts workshops, she is dedicated to the use and development of creative and arts-based methods for social research and public engagement.
Read more about ADM+S researchers.
Learn more about the UN’s theme of DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality.
