What People in Rural Villages in Togo Can Teach Us About ML/AI and Privacy with Zoe Kahn | AI & Equality Pub-Talk
April 9 @ 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
🔗 Access paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3710968
How do people living in rural villages in Togo feel about the use of emerging technologies in humanitarian aid? This work reports on the privacy concerns of people living in rural Togo related to the use of machine learning models trained on phone data to allocate cash assistance to people living in poverty, highlighting an innovative method — sociotechnical visuals — to explain complex technical concepts so that people living in rural villages with limited literacy, formal education, and familiarity with digital tech could provide meaningful input.
About the speaker:
Zoe Kahn is a postdoctoral research at the Research Centre for Trustworthy Data Science and Security. She received her PhD in Information Science from UC Berkeley and her B.A. in Sociology from New York University. Her research lies at the intersection of computer science, law, and society. She explores how people can meaningfully participate in the design of sociotechnical systems — especially those shaping public life, governance, and digital rights. Dr. Kahn has collaborated with diverse communities across Africa and the United States, including extended fieldwork in rural Togo.
Her work combines qualitative research with creative methods such as storytelling and sociotechnical visuals to make complex technical systems more understandable, opening up dialogue with people with varying levels of literacy, formal education, and familiarity with digital tech. Beyond academia, she has worked at a civil rights law firm, tech startup, and Microsoft–where she contributed to responsible AI tooling and governance frameworks.