Festival of Ideas
May 22, 2026. Online and Free
A Global Conversation. One Day and no Borders. Join us!
Where the frontlines meet the code.
Algorithms are deciding who gets bail, who gets a loan, whose language gets spoken by machines, whose body gets flagged at the border, and whose labor gets automated into poverty.
The AI & Equality Festival of Ideas will convene the people working with algorithms; linguists building language models for African languages, feminist scholars rewriting the benchmarks, digital rights lawyers fighting surveillance states, health researchers exposing algorithmic bias in clinical care, and organizers connecting the dots between AI, labor, climate, and indigenous land rights.
On May 22, leading organisations will be sharing out loud, across disciplines, about what they are finding, what they are fighting for, and what it will actually take to get there.
May 22, 2026
Online and Free to attend
8:00 AM – 11:30 PM UTC
If you are a researcher, organizer, lawyer, clinician, journalist, policy advocate, or technologist, and you believe the future of AI must be shaped by more than the handful of companies currently building it, this festival is for you!
On the Agenda:
A full day of 90-minute sessions hosted by leading organizations working at the frontlines of AI and social justice from around the world.
Sessions running across all time zones, from South Asia to the Pacific Coast. Wherever you are, there’s a session for you covering the questions that matter most:
- Who does AI harm — and how do we prove it?
- Whose knowledge gets encoded — and whose gets erased?
- What would a feminist, decolonial, rights-based AI actually look like?
- How do we get from research to real change?
Full programme drops April 15.
For three years, the AI & Equality Initiative has brought together a global community of researchers, activists, and technologists has been doing the hard work: interrogating AI systems, documenting harms, building alternatives, and refusing to accept that the future is already written.
On May 22, we open the doors. We believe that together we can re-imagine the status quo and create a fair future.
Lead Organisers
Anna-Maria Gueorguieva
PhD student at the University of Washington Information School, her research focuses on creating and conducting evaluations for the behavior and usage of AI systems in social and political contexts as well as contributing to AI and data governance through research evaluating the effectiveness AI and data privacy laws in the United States.
Leyla Roksan Caglar
Postdoctoral Fellow in the Windreich Department for AI & Human Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, working at the intersection of neuroscience, AI, and cognitive science to understand how systems with different learning mechanisms acquire, generalize, and represent perceptual information and how we can use these insights to build safe, transparent, and responsible AI systems.
Steph Wright
Head of Scottish AI Alliance. Steph led on Data Lab’s efforts in support of the Scottish Government in developing Scotland’s AI Strategy and she’s now excited to help deliver the strategy’s vision for Scotland to be a leader in the development and use of trustworthy, ethical and inclusive AI. She is also Co-Founder of Diverse AI.
Marie Mirsch
A serial coalition builder from New York and permanently based in Geneva. Co-founder of the International Gender Champions (2015), and the A+ Alliance for Inclusive Algorithms (2019). Co-chair of Expert Group for 2023 UN Commission on the Status of Women CSW67 on priority theme of Technology & Innovation.
Marit Brademann
Extern with The AI Policy Lab at The University of Umeå, a Junior Fellow with The AULA Fellowship, and Graduate Student at the University of Edinburgh
Amina Soulimani
PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Cape Town (South Africa) investigating human-machine interactions in hospitals, and contextualized ethics of care. Doctoral Research Fellow at HUMA — Institute for Humanities in Africa.
Caitlin Kraft-Buchman
A serial coalition builder from New York and permanently based in Geneva. Co-founder of the International Gender Champions (2015), and the A+ Alliance for Inclusive Algorithms (2019). Co-chair of Expert Group for 2023 UN Commission on the Status of Women CSW67 on priority theme of Technology & Innovation.
By joining our community you can take part in these events, stay up to date with advancements on topics related to AI & Equality themes and connect with people from all over the world who are committed to building technology for a better future.