Exhibition

Through artistic research and investigations, the exhibition addresses the plurality of forms and approaches of practicing digital sovereignty. 

Bettina Berendt has been Professor for Internet and Society at the Technical University of Berlin since 2019, Director of the Weizenbaum Institute and Visiting Professor at KU Leuven, Belgium. Her current research includes Data Science und Critical Data Science, especially with respect to Privacy/Data Protection, discrimination and fairness, as well as AI and ethics, with a focus on textual and web-related data.

Until 2019 Bettina Berendt was professor at the Department of Computer Science / Research Group Declarative Languages and Artificial Intelligence at the KU Leuven and before that junior professor at the Institute of Business Informatics at the Humboldt University Berlin. Details on publications, lectures, projects, positions, courses and other activities can be found at www.berendt.de/bettina.

Florian is head of the research group “Working with Artificial Intelligence” at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society. His research interests include digitalization and labor, and working conditions in global production networks. His recent research projects focus on the impact of digitalization on supply chains and working conditions.

Antonio Casilli, is a professor of sociology at Telecom Paris, the telecommunication school of the Polytechnic Institute of Paris, and a researcher at the Interdisciplinairy Institute on Innovation (i3), a unit of the French CNRS. His research focuses on digital communication, fundamental rights and the future of work. He is the co-founder of the DiPLab (Digital Platform Labor) research program and of INDL (International Network on Digital Labor). In addition to several scientific publications in French, English and Italian, he is the author of “En attendant les robots” (Seuil, 2019; forthcoming University of Chicago Press, 2023). In 2020, he was the editorial advisor of the France Télévisions documentary series “Invisibles – Les travailleurs du clic”, based on his research.

Dr. Florence Chee is Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Program Director of the Center for Digital Ethics and Policy (CDEP) at Loyola University Chicago. She is also Founding Director of the Social & Interactive Media Lab Chicago (SIMLab), devoted to the in-depth study of social phenomena at the intersection of society and technology. Since 2020, she has served as an External Consultee to the Freedom Online Coalition’s (FOC) Taskforce on Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights (T-FAIR) and is a Key Constituent of the United Nations 3C Roundtable on Artificial Intelligence.

Mario Haim is a Professor of Communication Studies at LMU München. In his research he combines communication science with information technology.

Norbert Huchler is senior researcher at the ISF Munich (www.isf-muenchen.de) and member of its governing board. As a sociologist of work and technology he is engaged in manifold research projects on technological change of work, including topics like digitalization, smart manufacturing, and AI. He serves on various committees, such as the Platform “Learning Systems/AI” in Germany (Federal Ministry of Research and Education)

Sercan Kıyak is a Ph.D. student at KU Leuven Media Studies Institute. He has a background in sociology and focuses on social data science. He is interested in using digital research methods to analyze political communication, specifically about migration discourse on social media networks.

Member of the Board & Director (WZB) Weizenbaum-Institut e.V., head of the research group Globalization, Work and Production at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) and Professor for International Industrial Relations at the Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg.. He holds a Ph.D. from the FU Berlin and habilitated there in sociology. He is co-director of the doctoral program “Good Work” at the WZB and a member of the steering committee of the international automotive research network GERPISA. He is also a board member of the industrial and labor sociology section of the German Sociological Association.

Martin Krzywdzinski is active on a number of advisory boards (e.g. for MIT’s “Future of Work” program) and as a reviewer for funding institutions, foundations, and journals. He conducts research into the changing nature of work in the context of globalisation and digitalisation and has led a number of internationally positioned research projects, including research into the changing nature of work in emerging economies, crowdwork and Industrie 4.0.

Elizaveta Kuznetsova is the leader of the research group “Platform Algorithms and Digital Propaganda” at Weizenbaum Insitute. She works at the intersection of Communication Studies and International Relations. Her primary focus is on digital propaganda, social media platforms, and international media. She is interested in legacies of historical practices of propaganda and political communication as well as new developments in the digital world. She uses mixed-methods approaches, combining discourse studies, framing and computational methods.

Elizaveta holds a PhD in International Politics from City, University of London. She is former fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University and at the Center for the European Studies at Boston University.

Ernesto is a PhD candidate in political communication at the Institute of Communication and Media Studies at the University of Bern. His research focuses on political information flows in a digital age and its effects on political attitudes.

Dr. Fen Jennifer Lin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at the City University of Hong Kong. Her research interest includes media and social change, political communication, journalism, information governance, communication technology, and policy innovation. Her articles have been published in interdisciplinary journals and edited books, and she has received honors including the Visiting Scholarship of Columbia University, the Top Faculty Paper Award of the International Communication Association, William Rainey Harper and Social Science Visiting Committee Fellow, and Robert E. Park Lectureship Award.

She is also a founding member of the Asia-Europe Consortium for AI Research (AECAIR), a platform that aims to offer an interdisciplinary thinking space for social science research – across the Eurasian continent and beyond – in order to gather researchers, experts, and practitioners in the expanding field of AI. She obtained her BA in Economics from Peking University; MS in Statistics and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago.

Anna Litvinenko is a researcher at the “Digitalization and Participation” department of the Institute for Media and Communication Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests include social media, political mobilization, platform dependence, and internet governance.

Mykola Makhortykh is an Alfred Landecker Lecturer at the Institute of Communication and Media Studies at the University of Bern. His research interests include, among others, news recommender systems, search engines and digital remembrance.

Anoush Margaryan is a Full Professor of Learning Sciences in the Department of Digitalization at Copenhagen Business School.  She studies how people learn and develop skills in the workplace, in particular within emergent AI-mediated work settings.  She has over 130 scientific publications and has led over 20 interdisciplinary, international and intersectoral research projects funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, Shell, Energy Institute, the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (CEDEFOP), Volkswagen Foundation and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, among others.

Fran Meissner is Assistant Professor of Critical Geodata Studies and Geodata Ethics at the University of Twente, Netherlands. Fran previously worked as Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Leiden. Among other positions, she has held a highly competitive Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellowship at the TU Delft and a Max Weber Fellowship at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. She is also a long-term research partner at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Her research focuses on the design and logics behind geotechnology infrastructures and how these shape urban social configurations.

Uli Meyer is Professor of Sociology with a focus on digitalization, new media and industrial development at Johannes Kepler University Linz (Austria). Based on neo-institutionalist approaches and organizational sociology, his research explores innovation processes and the constitution of scientific fields, as well as sensemaking and narratives about sociotechnical futures.

Oscar Molina is associate professor at the Department of Sociology, Autonomous University of Barcelona and researcher at the Sociological Research Centre on Everyday Life and Work (QUIT) and the Institute for Labour Studies (IET). His research focuses on comparative employment relations, labour market policies, comparative political economy. He is coordinator of Eurofound’s correspondent team in Spain and is currently coordinating the INCODING Project, analysing the role of collective bargaining in governing the use of artificial intelligence and algorithms at work. 

Jan Tobias joined the ULB Cybersecurity Research Center in 2023 as a professor for Embedded Systems Security. He researches topics involving privacy, safety and security of information and communication systems, with particular interest in dependable embedded systems and secure critical ICT infrastructures, and in interdisciplinary research on questions around the responsible and sustainable development and use of ICTs. Jan Tobias is specifically interested in societal aspects of security and privacy in dependable systems, in trusted execution environments, and in security architectures for safety-critical embedded systems.

Before joining ULB, Jan Tobias worked as a research manager at KU Leuven (BE), a researcher at the University of Bamberg (DE), obtained a Ph.D. from the University of York (UK) and worked as a researcher at the University of Applied Sciences in Brandenburg (DE), where he also acquired his Master’s degree in Computer Science.

Efrat Nechushtai is an assistant professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University and a Knight News Innovation Fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. Her work explores the impact of platformization and political polarization on journalism in the United States and internationally.

Sabine Pfeiffer is Professor of Sociology (Technology, Work, and Society) at Friedrich Alexander University Nürnberg-Erlangen. Her research focuses on the linkages between technological and social innovation in the workplace. In her recent book “Digital Capitalism and Distributive Forces”, she discusses the current transformation of capitalist societies and explores developments like the platform economy and artificial intelligence.

Valeria Pulignano is Professor in Sociology of Work, Industrial Relations and Labour Markets at the Center for Sociological Research at KU Leuven. Her research interests include inequality and precarious work in traditional and digitalised workplaces, flexibility, quality of work and workers’ voice. She is PI of of ERC AdG ResPecTMe 

Francesca Pratesi is a Researcher at Information Science and Technology Institute of the National Research Council in Pisa since December 2021 and a member of the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Lab. Her research interests include data mining, data privacy and privacy risk assessment, mainly in spatio-temporal data. Recently, she broadens her interest, moving towards the Ethics-by-Design paradigm and Trustworthy AI.

Alessandra Raffaetà – MSc (1994) and PhD (2000) in Computer Science, University of Pisa – is an assistant professor at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy). Her research interests include Data warehouses, GISs, spatio-temporal reasoning, design and formal semantics of programming languages and constraint logic programming. She published over 60 papers on international journals and conferences. She was member of the program committee of several international conferences and she participated to several national and international research projects.

Chiara Renso is  senior researcher at ISTI institute of National Research Council of Italy.  The focus of her research is addressing interesting, often yet unsolved problems, related to the enrichment, representation, analysis of semantic rich trajectory data, also considering privacy and ethical aspects.

Dr. Geoffrey Rockwell is a Professor of Philosophy and Digital Humanities and Associate Director of AI for Society signature area at the University of Alberta. Rockwell publishes on textual analysis and visualization, ethics of technology and on the digital humanities including a co-edited book on Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene (Open Book Publishers, 2021) and a co-authored book Hermeneutica: Computer-Assisted Interpretation in the Humanities (MIT Press, 2016). He is co-developer of Voyant Tools (voyant-tools.org), an award winning suite of text analysis tools.

Akrati Saxena is a research fellow at Einhoven University of Technology. Her research interests include computational social science, machine learning, and social media analysis

Daniel Trielli is an Assistant Professor of Journalism at Loyola University Chicago. He researches how news reaches the public in our increasingly algorithmically-defined world and how journalists can cover algorithms. As part of that overarching question, he is interested in data and computational journalism, media literacy, and algorithmic accountability.