All Tech Is Human and the Consulate General of Finland Present Strengthening the Information Ecosystem on March 6, 2024
All Tech Is Human is partnering with the Consulate General of Finland in New York to co-host Strengthening the Information Ecosystem on March 6, 2024 from 3:00-8:30 PM ET at the Consulate General of Finland in NYC. This highly curated gathering will bring together 75 experts from across civil society, government, industry, and academia to discuss methods to fortify information integrity. The panels will discuss best practices in building relationships to advance trust and resilience in the information ecosystem while also exploring concrete ways to combat disinformation and strategic influence operations on both a technical and societal level. Strengthening the Information Ecosystem will feature two panels and dedicated time to building relationships, finding synergies and potential areas for collaboration, and sharing resources and best practices.
We are now accepting applications to attend Strengthening the Information Ecosystem! Click below to start your application. Some of the companies, organizations, and universities that will be in attendance include: Access Now, Alethea, Amazon, Bipartisan Policy Center, Bloomberg, Booz Allen Hamilton, Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), Center For News, Technology & Innovation, Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP) at NYU, Columbia University, CyberPeace Institute, Democracy Works, Disinfo Defense League, East-West Management Institute, Ford Foundation, Freedom House, Future of Privacy Forum, German Marshall Fund, Google, IBM, Integrity Institute, International Council for Media Literacy (IC4ML), Meta, Microsoft, National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance, National Endowment for Democracy (NED), NC Young People's Alliance, Oversight Board, Responsible Innovation Labs, UNICEF, WIRED.
Panel 1: Building National & International Resilience for Information Integrity
Mis/disinformation can have disastrous consequences and can compound existing national issues. Combatting mis/disinformation is not just about requiring transparency and reporting from tech platforms but also requires domestic resilience. This panel will explore ways to enhance domestic resilience against mis/disinformation by examining rights-respecting methods to develop quality journalism and media sectors, educate the public on a digital literacy baseline, and rebuild trust in public institutions. Since countries have varying capacities, priorities, and governance mechanisms, panelists will consider case studies from the U.S., EU, and global majority to draw on lessons learned from a variety of contexts. The panel aims to highlight multi-disciplinary solutions to promoting information integrity while taking into consideration countries’ differing national environments.
Michelle Ciulla Lipkin, Executive Director, National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE)
Michelle Ciulla Lipkin has served as Executive Director of the National Association for Media Literacy Education since 2012. Michelle has helped NAMLE grow to be the preeminent media literacy education association in the U.S. She launched Media Literacy Week in the U.S. now in its 10th year, developed strategic partnerships with companies such as Thomson Reuters, Meta, YouTube, and Nickelodeon, and restructured both the governance and membership of NAMLE. She has overseen seven national conferences, created the National Media Literacy Alliance for teacher membership organizations, and done countless appearances at conferences and in the media regarding the importance of media literacy education. Michelle was the recipient of the 2020 Global Media and Information Literacy Award given by UNESCO.
Michelle is an alumni of the U.S. Dept. of State’s International Visitors Program (Australia/2018). She regularly serves as Adjunct Lecturer at Brooklyn College where she teaches Media Literacy. She sits on the Advisory Council for the ML3: Librarians as Leaders for Media Literacy initiative led by Project Look Sharp.
Michelle began her career in children’s television production, in various roles on both corporate and production teams. She earned both her undergraduate and graduate degrees from New York University. Michelle focused her grad work on children and television where she caught the “media literacy bug”. After graduate school, Michelle worked as a facilitator for The LAMP (Learning about Multimedia Project) teaching media literacy and production classes for Pre-Kindergarten to 5th grade students.
Her passion for media literacy education stems from a very personal place. Learn more about Michelle’s story here.
When not thinking about media literacy, Michelle is either sitting at home in Brooklyn with her dog and husband, most likely reading, or at one of her kids’ music gigs somewhere around the country.
Charlton McIlwain, Co-Chair, Ethics Committee, International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE); Vice Provost for Faculty Engagement, Pathways & Public Interest Technology, NYU
Author of the recent book, Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, From the Afronet to Black Lives Matter, Dr. Charlton McIlwain is Vice Provost for Faculty Development, Pathways & Public Interest Technology at New York University, where he is also Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU Steinhardt. He works at the intersections of computing technology, race, inequality, and racial justice activism. He has served as an expert witness in landmark U.S. Federal Court cases on reverse redlining/racial targeting in mortgage lending and recently testified before the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services about the impacts of automation and artificial intelligence on the financial services sector. He is the author of the recent PolicyLink report Algorithmic Discrimination: A Framework and Approach to Auditing & Measuring the Impact of Race-Targeted Digital Advertising. He writes regularly for outlets such as The Guardian, Slate's Future Tense, MIT Technology Review and other outlets about the intersection of race and technology. McIlwain is the founder of the Center for Critical Race & Digital Studies, and is Board President at Data & Society Research Institute. He leads NYU’s Alliance for Public Interest Technology, is NYU’s Designee to the Public Interest Technology University Network, and serves on the executive committee as co-chair of the ethics panel for the International Panel on the Information Environment.
Daniel Arnaudo, Senior Advisor for Information Strategies, National Democratic Institute
Daniel Arnaudo is an advisor at NDI for information strategies, covering the intersection of democracy and technology with a special responsibility to develop programs tracking disinformation and promoting information integrity worldwide. Concurrently, he is a Cybersecurity Fellow at the University of Washington’s Jackson School of International Studies where he has worked on projects in Brazil, Myanmar, and the United States. Recently, he also collaborated with the Oxford Internet Institute’s research group on Computational Propaganda. His research focuses on online political campaigns, digital rights, cybersecurity, and information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D). He earned masters degrees in Information Management and International Studies at UW by completing a thesis on Brazil and its Bill of Rights for the internet, the Marco Civil. In past, he has worked for the Arms Control Association, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Carter Center, and consulted for a wide range of organizations including Microsoft, the Center on International Cooperation at NYU, and NASA.
Sruthi Palaniappan, Vice President, Operations and New Products, NewsGuard
Sruthi Palaniappan is Vice President of Operations and New Products at NewsGuard. Previously, she served as Deputy General Manager, during which she managed key projects across all parts of the business, from editorial to business development and operations.
Prior to joining NewsGuard, Palaniappan completed a broadcast internship at CNN, worked as a political fellow at ABC News, and worked as a contractor on Facebook’s politics and government outreach team. She received a Master of Public Policy in 2021 from the University of Oxford, where she hosted a policy podcast called Oxford Policy Pod. She graduated from Harvard College, where she studied Government and served as Student Body President. Disclosure: In high school, Palaniappan volunteered for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and was a delegate at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.
Moderator: Jeff Allen, Co-Founder, Integrity Institute
Jeff Allen is a former physicist and astronomer who left academia for data science in 2013. Since then, he has worked on multiple sides of the internet information ecosystem: on publishers who are trying to maximize the traffic they get from platforms, on platforms themselves, and on political organizations and campaigns just trying to navigate the online spaces.
While at Facebook, he worked on tackling systemic issues in the public content ecosystems of Facebook and Instagram, developing strategies to ensure that the incentive structure that the platforms created for publishers was in alignment with Facebooks company mission statement.
Jeff is the co-founder and Chief Research Officer for the Integrity Institute. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Panel 2: Strengthening Partnerships to Protect the Information Environment
Combatting mis/disinformation is a complex topic that requires a multisectoral approach – neither industry, civil society nor government can go it alone. This panel will focus on bringing together experts from industry, civil society, and government to discuss best practices in building multisectoral partnerships that can effectively fight mis/disinformation. This includes ways to strengthen and expand current cross-sectoral communication efforts, campaigns, and programs. Panelists will explore examples where multistakeholder initiatives to combat mis/disinformation were effective due to strong partnerships such as in Taiwan, Chile, or France. Consideration will also be given to what platform data needs to be reported to inform such strategies, and how current legislation, such as the Digital Services Act, provides such data and what reporting mechanisms still need to be expanded on.
Niamh Hanafin, Senior Advisor Information Integrity, UNDP
Niamh Hanafin is a seasoned communication for social change specialist. She joined UNDP’s Global Policy Centre for Governance (GPC) in 2020 in response to growing calls from country offices for support in responding to COVID19 disinformation. Niamh now leads UNDP’s global information integrity workstream, collaborating across UNDP and externally to improve understanding of and responses to information pollution in the contexts where UNDP is engaging. She is the architect of UNDP's strategic guidance: Information Integrity: Forging a Pathway to Truth, Resilience and Trust. Niamh represents UNDP in global forums, leads UNDP's information integrity research agenda and provides guidance to regional hubs and country offices on programmatic responses.
Prior to UNDP, Niamh spent 8 years with Search for Common Ground, leading multi-million-dollar peacebuilding portfolios in Africa and Asia. She has over 20 years' experience designing and managing innovative communications programming promoting children’s rights, conflict resolution and reconciliation, reproductive health, and women's rights.
Niamh holds a B.A. in Communication Studies from Dublin City University and a Master’s degree in Communication for Development from Malmo University. She has lived in Cambodia, Laos, Mozambique, Angola and Madagascar and worked in Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, DRC, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, and Central African Republic.
Swapneel Mehta, Founder, SimPPL; Post-doc, MIT and BU; Affiliate at All Tech Is Human
Swapneel Mehta is a Postdoctoral Associate and Founder of SimPPL. At Boston University and MIT, Swapneel researches platform governance and free speech. He holds a Ph.D. from NYU's Center for Data Science, specializing in machine learning, causal inference, and their application to social media and politics at CSMAP. In 2021, he founded SimPPL, a research collective focused on creating responsible computing tools using AI. The collective has won awards, grants, and fellowships from Google, Mozilla, Amazon, the Wikimedia Foundation, the Goethe Institute, the Center for Tech and Society, the NYC Media Lab, and others. Swapneel is passionate about empowering researchers from the global south to participate in mitigating online harms and building responsible AI tools for global audiences. He has previously worked on machine learning products and research at Slack, Adobe, Twitter, Oxford, CERN, and various startups catering to Fortune 50 clients in the domains of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity.
Rebecca Thein, Technical Program Manager - Information Integrity and Harmful & Illegal Content, Twitter
Rebecca Thein is an accomplished professional, specializing in product, program, and people management at the confluence of society, responsible product development, and accessible design. Her most recent role as Senior Technical Program Manager at Twitter was pivotal, where she played a central role in leading the global expansion of civic and crisis response initiatives. Her expertise guided significant projects, such as overseeing operations during the Brazil & US midterm elections, addressing COVID-related misinformation, and managing crisis situations, notably the conflict in Ukraine. Additionally, she is recognized as a Fellow through the Integrity Institute, where she continues to provide her expertise in the field of responsible technology and brings extensive experience from her earlier role as a member of the Tech and Democracy working group through All Tech is Human, contributing information instrumental in crafting their most recent Responsible Tech Guide. Rebecca's dedication extends to her role as a Digital Sherlock through The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Lab, where she demonstrates her commitment to digital safety and cybersecurity.
Rebecca's commitment to responsible tech and civic integrity extends to her participation in various conferences and speaking engagements. Notably, she has been an invited panelist at DEFCON's Voting Village, addressing the 2024 Election Threat Landscape. She has shared her expertise on topics such as "Building Competencies for Civic Integrity Professionals" at the RightsCon International Human Rights Conference in Costa Rica. Recently she has been a guest speaker at Georgetown University on two occasions, presenting insightful discussions on Digital Disruptions to Democracy and the specific impact of AI on the 2024 elections. Her contributions and presentations underscore her influence in the domains of responsible tech and technology and democracy. Rebecca's influential podcast appearances, articles, and co-authored materials further establish her as a prominent figure in the responsible tech and technology and democracy domains.
Dr. Sean Guillory, Lead Scientist for Cognitive Domain/Dimension Products and Capabilities, Booz Allen Hamilton
Dr. Sean Guillory is the Lead Scientist for Booz Allen Hamilton’s Cognitive Domain/Dimension Products and Capabilities. Sean specializes in the utilization of neuroscience, psychology, social science, and machine learning to help build concepts and products for Defense and National Security. He holds a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from Dartmouth College.
Moderator: Christina Nemr, Founder, Becera
Christina Nemr is the founder and CEO of Becera, a company that bridges the public and private sectors to address challenges in the digital environment that yield instability and conflict. She has helped develop counter-extremism and counter-disinformation policy and run global programming for over a decade in collaboration with governments, civil society, academia, and the private sector, with increasing focus on understanding and applying emerging tech against complex issues in the information environment. She started her career with the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Counterterrorism, where she was a founding member of the countering violent extremism program. She is a senior fellow at the Global Center on Cooperative Security and serves as an advisor to multiple counter-extremism NGOs. She has degrees in International Relations and Forensic Psychology.
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