The ADM+S Centre draws on the humanities, social and technological sciences. Our research is designed to expand, integrate, and apply our knowledge of the dynamics of ADM. In order to achieve this, we combine four research programs and four focus areas.
Select the yellow items in our interactive diagram below to explore our research areas.
Data science +
Critical data studies +
Computer science +
Law +
Regulatory theory +
Economics +
Ethics +
Sociology +
Design +
Anthropology
Ethical design for ADM machines +
Sustainable governance +
Public engagement,
co-design and trust
THE FOCUS AREAS
The Centre’s four cross-centre Focus Areas bring together our researchers to look at how automated decision-making works in four key domains – News and Media, Mobilities, Health, and Social Services.
Our focus areas have been chosen because:
- they are well-documented areas where decision-making technologies are widely used;
- they align closely to national research priorities and agendas; and
- they are domains where governments and communities have coordinated, regulated and pooled resources to manage and mitigate major social risks – to public health and welfare, mobility, and democracy.
The introduction of new, untested decision-making technologies in these domains creates new possibilities for success and failure in large-scale institutional systems that have been specifically designed to reduce individual and social hazards.
The Focus Areas provide material for many of the empirical investigations in the four research programs, and they ensure our research is directed towards engagement, translation and outcomes in exemplary and essential sectors. Their hallmark is close collaboration with our partner organisations and stakeholders.
THE RESEARCH PROGRAMS
Automated decision-making systems are not purely technological: they comprise a number of elements, including the data that enables predictive decision-making machines; the institutions that provide regulatory settings; and the people who design, use, imagine and adapt automated systems, and whose lives are affected by them.
The Centre’s four Research Programs — Data, Machines, Institutions, and People — examine all the different elements that constitute automated decision-making systems. Together, they enable us to build the first comprehensive account of the social development, distribution, dynamics, performance and effects of ADM.
The ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) has launched new key projects responding to the complex challenges and opportunities presented by emerging automated decision-making and artificial intelligence systems. These projects mark the second half of the Centre’s life.
Drawing on international perspectives from academic partners, organisations, and collaborators, the new research projects will address high-level challenges of automated decision-making in society, from generative authenticity, regulation, and cultural curation to inclusive AI.
Since 2020, researchers at the ADM+ Centre have been working to map the expanding reach of automated systems and gauge their impacts across Australia. They have established a range of sociotechnical approaches, including tools and frameworks, for understanding and addressing the impacts of automation on society.
Building on existing tools and research, the innovative projects will use synthetic data t simulate and predict policy outcomes, map the ecological impacts of ADM use, and provide unprecedented observability of platform operation, news content curation, diverse accessibility, and more.
Using a participatory approach to engage affected communities, organisations, and civil society that are impacted by the technologies, our research brings an independent perspective to the development and application of AI and ADM tools to ensure they are responsible, ethical and inclusive.
The new research program seeks to provide transformational insight into addressing higher-level challenges of automated decision-making in society.
Advancing knowledge about the impacts and entanglements of ADM and AI with ecosystems and multi species and the capacity of institutions to make responsible decisions about ADM and AI applications on the environment and animals.
Creating new methods to document emerging forms of automated advertising, and enabling industry, civil society and government to respond to the challenges it poses for observability and accountability.
Our premise is that everyone should have the opportunity to benefit from digital technologies: to manage their health, access education and services, participate in cultural activities, organise their finances, follow news and media, and connect with family, friends, and the wider world.
Examining the impacts of diverse search queries on the breadth and quality of search engine outputs.
Addressing the knowledge, skills and literacies – the critical capabilities – needed to achieve inclusive AI in Australia.
Developing strategies for intervening in the automated flow of culture to advance Centre priorities of responsive, ethical, and inclusive automated decision making.
Developing and testing a novel suite of generative and data driven simulations, useful for depicting current and future urban scenarios, including in mobility, urban policymaking, and health domains.
Examining the assumptions and community impacts of proposed solutions to the problem of authenticity in Generative AI and exploring novel technical responses that contribute to more responsible, ethical and inclusive ADM systems.
Investigating the challenges and opportunities for cultural and linguistic diversity in automated decision-making and AI across Australia and the Asia-Pacific region.
Measuring digital inclusion and media use in remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
Examining the broad range of regulatory questions raised by ADMs, their supply chains, and deployments, as well as the role of ADMs as regulatory tools.
Forming new approaches that combines fairness, privacy and legal guarantees for ADM systems, such as recommender and machine learning based systems.
Developing a theoretical classification to operationalise an empirical mapping program for automated decision-making (ADM).
Examining the ways in which automated decision-making systems impact public and shared space via sensors that produce actionable digital simulations, artefacts, and interfaces.
This project will examine existing practices in the collection and use of sexual data by both private and public actors.
This project will create a next generation recommender system that enables equitable allocation of constrained resources.
Investigating the increasing use of automated decision-making systems in the provision of automated loans in India.
This project is a review of the current state of ADM implementation, practices and visions in different regions in the Global South.
This project aims to collaboratively design, prototype, and pilot an automated data extraction tool to support welfare rights lawyers in making sense of Services Australia (Centrelink) system-generated Freedom of Information (FOI) documents.
What shapes the environmental impacts of data centres cooling infrastructures?
Our research addresses how shifts in and imaginaries of mobilities technologies, services, communities and personal trajectories are changing the landscape of everyday mobility, and reframes emerging automated and connected mobility technologies and data as part of inclusive and diverse everyday worlds and respectful, responsible futures.
Examining the political economy of ‘sex tech’ in order to identify how sexual technologies are being governed at scale, how sexual data is being collected, stored, shared and monetised, and how the material benefits of sex tech may be more equitably distributed.
This project seeks to generate better understandings of the functions, capacities, and normative role of humans within automated decision systems.
This project investigates the extent to which automated decision-making systems impact the provision of consumer insurance via pricing algorithms which may produce unfair outcomes for particular subsets of society by engaging in proxy and price discrimination.
Identifying the opportunities, enablers and barriers for public interest litigation to promote accountability and fairness in automated decision-making.
Recent developments in machine learning and information access communities attempt to define fairness-aware metrics to incorporate into these frameworks. This project will address a number of research questions related to quantifying and measuring bias and engagement that remain unexplored.
Investigating current developments in journalistic practice by conducting in-depth interviews with news workers, including journalists, social media editors, developers, programmers, computer scientists, graphic designers and social media marketing staff.
COMPLETED RESEARCH PROJECTS
This project aims to develop new computational methods to prevent language-oriented automated decision-making (ADM) systems from generating harmful content.
This project brings together expertise in digital media, platform studies, and law with data science and machine learning to study the roles and data operations of bots – pre-programmed automated agents – on social media platforms.
How might platform regulators and moderators better distinguish between education and information content, and other forms of sexual texts and imagery on social media platforms?
Creating a replicable framework for building capacity (expertise, literacy, data partnerships and data governance) to unlock the social value and impact of advanced data analytics, AI and ADM across the not-for-profit sector.
Mapping where ADM is and how it is being used in social services beyond Europe and North America, and into the Asia-Pacific region.
Trauma-informed AI: Developing and testing a practical AI audit framework for use in social services
This project seeks to co-design an innovative AI trauma-informed audit framework to assess the extent to which an AI’s decisions may generate new trauma or re-traumatise
Investigating the enablers of digital transformation and considers digital futures within the cultural sector through evaluating the outcomes of ACMI’s CEO Digital Mentoring Program.
Examining the challenges to, and opportunities for, liberal and democratic institutions and governance presented by ADM.
Developing a theoretically rich analysis of democracy and freedom given ADM.
This project unpicks the detail of the conceptual frameworks that inform ADM as well as the ways they are engaged in the everyday work practices of developers, designers, businesses and policy makers.
This project seeks to scope several approaches to deal with Automated Decision-Making and Decision-Support Systems-Related Risks (ADM/DSS RR) through norms and provide an evaluation of those approaches for their consideration in regulatory contexts.
Assessing prospective harms vs prospective benefits associated with ADM as a first step to amelioration.
Creating a replicable framework for building capacity (expertise, literacy, data partnerships and data governance) to unlock the social value and impact of advanced data analytics, AI and ADM across the not-for-profit sector.
Operationalising new data partnerships and implementing data analysis to improve non-profit and humanitarian sector work.
Considering ethical approaches in the area of automated decision-making (ADM) and civic life with a focus on civic commitments and concerns.
Exploring the role of everyday data practices and literacies in automated decision-making.
By documenting experiences of the so-called 17%, the people who see the world differently, this project reveals biases and threats of automated transport mobilities and also uncovers creative opportunity and innovation.
Considering ethical approaches in the area of automated decision-making (ADM) and civic life with a focus on civic commitments and concerns.
This project seeks to generate better understandings of the functions, capacities, and normative role of humans within automated decision systems.
The project will provide non-profit CEOs, managers, practitioners and board members with feasible strategies for getting into data analytics or assessing and building their organisation’s data capability.
Experimenting with creative methods to explore future visions of automated mobilities in Australia.
Working with Brimbank City Council and a wider reference group, the project team will co-design a robust AI governance strategy to guide the policies and practices for the development and deployment of AI systems.
This project is a partnership between ADM+S and the New South Wales Ombudsman to map and analyse the use of automated systems in state and local government sectors in New South Wales (NSW).