Join the CTM for a transformative launch event, with an interactive media art exhibition, a drum performance, and an original XR scavenger hunt-style game with an exciting prize for the winner.
Keynote Speakers:
- Lindsay Grace (University of Miami)
- Anthony Townsend (Cornell Tech)
- Francisco Valdean (State University of Rio de Janeiro)
Guest Speakers:
- Eric Gordon (Boston University)
- Germaine Halegoua (University of Michigan)
- David Nemer (University of Virginia)
Registration is free but required and spots are limited.
SCHEDULE
8:30-9:30: WELCOME
8:30-9:00: BREAKFAST
9:00-9:30: INTRODUCTIONS
NETWORKED MOBILITIES & URBAN AI
9:30-10:00: KEYNOTE 1
*co-sponsored by the Boston Urban Salon
Intelligence for Adaptation: How AI Can Empower Communities Coping with Climate Change*
Anthony Townsend (Urban Tech Hub at Cornell Tech)
The impacts of global heating in cities are growing. Adapting to climate change is a high and growing priority for city governments and urban communities. Yet our understanding of the goals of adaptation is changing. Reducing risk and building resilience is no longer enough. Ethical approaches to climate adaptation aim to transform the unfair systems that produce climate vulnerability in the first place. Key to that effort is expanding the role of marginalized stakeholders in urban climate adaptation. This talk will explore and examine the role that artificial intelligence innovations could play in empowering urban communities coping with climate change. From resilience planning chatbots to synthetic visualizations of flooded streets, we will map the possibilities and risks presented by these emerging technologies for the urgent and loaded work of responsible participatory climate adaptation.
Moderator: Jeffrey Boase (University of Toronto)
10:00-11:15: PANEL 1
GUEST SPEAKER: Germaine Halegoua (University of Michigan)
Biased Mobilities and Hybrid Spaces: Exploring Intersections of Urban AI and Differential Mobilities
Historically, urban design for differential mobilities and disability inclusion has been an afterthought. While scholars, digital rights, and disability rights advocates have produced important work on disability in smart cities and bias within AI systems, these conversations are further complicated by the growing influence of AI technologies within essential urban infrastructures. In this short presentation, I’ll draw from a working paper (co-authored with Ria Gualano and Scott Campbell) to highlight the ways in which urban AI systems shape understandings of urban mobilities, and to explore the implications of AI biases for disability access within cities. Following this discussion, I’ll introduce “reparative AI” as a framework for understanding and implementing more ethical and equitable urban AI systems.
Ryan Wang (Northeastern University)
Who gets to breathe clean air in our cities, and who is left struggling for it? Urban air pollution is an invisible threat, disproportionately impacting vulnerable communities. Toxic-Free Footprints for Urban Communities leverages human mobility data, geosocial networking, edge computing, and social science to monitor and mitigate exposure. By equipping communities with real-time, location-specific air quality information, this initiative empowers individuals to make informed decisions to protect their respiratory health and advocate for cleaner urban environments.
Zorana Matic (Northeastern University)
What if AI were used as a tool for urban justice, memory, and cultural resilience? Ethnic communities such as Boston’s Chinatown can be reimagined as ‘urban sensors’—networked spaces where AI-driven spatial mapping, stakeholder analysis, and counter-surveillance technologies help resist gentrification and amplify community agency. Instead of optimizing cities for capital, AI could be mobilized to preserve third places, sustain social infrastructures, and redefine urban intelligence as a force for belonging.
Chris LeDantec (Northeastern University)
The data are a distraction. We have decades of municipal and civic tech grounded in solving for data – for insight, for efficiency – instead of solving for community and civic outcomes. This has left us with civic systems that are unsustainable, systems that are subverted and subsumed by the neoliberal impulse to market efficiencies, and systems that bend governance and advocacy around the needs of data and computing instead of people and communities.
Moderator: Mimi Sheller (Worcester Polytechnic Institute)
11:30-11:45: COFFEE BREAK
ENGAGED PLAY & LEARNING
11:45-12:30: KEYNOTE 2
Social Impact Through Play: The Transformative Power of Games and Play to Move US Toward a Better Future
Lindsay Grace (University of Miami)
Drawing from his experience addressing complex problems in journalism, misinformation, education, and more, the lecture outlines the theories that underpin applying play to improve society and technological solutions. The idea is not merely the application of games to increase engagement or retention, but instead the integration of playful characteristics to improve problem solving and the competency of creative systems like generative AI. The lecture explains the human propensity for play as an essential element in the future of human-computer interaction, especially when focused on social impact.
Moderator: Caleb Gayle (Northeastern University)
12:30-1:30: LUNCH
1:30-2:45: PANEL 2
GUEST SPEAKER: Eric Gordon (Boston University)
Embracing Inefficiency: Play as resistance
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk’s (fictional) agency in the Trump administration, seeks to reform the federal government through reducing costs and saving time. This logic of efficiency, when applied to markets, can be effective for maximizing profits. But when it is applied to government, where metrics such as well-being, safety, access to services, equality, efficacy, and trust, are what should be prioritized, efficiency alone is destructive. In my 2020 book, Meaningful Inefficiencies, I looked to games and play as counterpoints to government efficiency. Games, I argued, are necessarily inefficient systems, where one’s path to completing a goal is interrupted by “unnecessary obstacles.” Yes, removing obstacles maximizes speed; but systems built primarily for efficiency preclude one’s ability to play, which is where meaning is made and trust is formed. The way to cultivate functional democratic institutions is to deliberately design (meaningful) inefficiencies into them. This doesn’t mean growing complacent with mere inefficiencies, or the bureaucratic systems riddled with redundancy and absurdities. Those exclude play also. The antidote to DOGE is to strategically insert meaningful inefficiencies into our democratic institutions. The resulting play is what will build our democratic muscle as the systems designed to support it are under attack.
Celia Pearce (Northeastern University)
Is Game Design Design? Generally speaking, the principles of design tend to focus on increasing usability and minimizing friction. Yet game designers do precisely the opposite of this. Not only is our job to create friction, but to craft it a way that is pleasing and motivating. This is, arguably, much harder than creating products and experiences that reduce friction. And while gamification is not the solution to every problem, understanding what it takes to craft aesthetically pleasing friction might provide some insight into how game thinking can be leveraged in other domains. For instance, research suggests that regular game-players are better at failure, that performance in the operating room by surgeons is improved after playing games, even games that have nothing to do with surgery, and that the challenges entailed in playing some types of games can help improve cognitive health in older adults. Can well-designed friction, coupled with the agency inherent in games, be looked at as a method to build participation and resiliency?
Amy Shirong Lu (Northeastern University)
How much tailoring is enough? My research explores how narrative-driven play enhances engagement, motivation, and well-being across the developmental spectrum. In exergames, tailoring plots and characters to player preferences promotes movement, engagement, and health. While customization enhances these outcomes, how much is too much? Could hyper-personalization narrow experiences, reinforcing echo chambers rather than shared play? As we design future games, how do we balance personalization with social integration, agency with cohesion, and individual needs with collective experience?
Eileen McGivney (Northeastern University)
We shouldn’t scale virtual reality in education. Big Tech is looking to score big by making immersive technologies that are plug-and-play, with killer apps for the classroom, that teachers and students won’t need to think twice about using. But what if the key to breaking the cycle of oversold and underused educational technologies is that we don’t design them for scale? Instead, teachers and students could make use of the increasing access to VR creation tools to make VR experiences that fit their own niche purposes, building a new kind of edtech industry.
Moderator: Ragan Glover (University of Michigan)
2:45-3:15: COFFEE BREAK
(MIS)INFORMATION, AI & DATA STORYTELLING
3:15-4:00: KEYNOTE 3
Contact Images: A Poetic Action
Francisco Valdean (State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
Contact Images is an immersive experience based on the project Itinerant Museum of Images from Maré (MIIM). MIIM is a mobile museum organized into cardboard boxes measuring 37 cm x 26 cm x 15 cm, containing a collection of photographs, stories, and memories from Maré, the largest complex of favelas in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). In this poetic performance, I will guide the audience through a journey that reveals stories from the favelas and propose new ways of envisioning and understanding Maré. I focus on the community’s creative potential, a vision in sharp contrast with the stigmatized perspective that associates favelas with violence. MIIM’s images affirm Maré’s community rights to live, celebrate, enjoy life, and engage in various cultural activities.
Moderator: Adriana de Souza e Silva (Northeastern University)
4:00-5:15: PANEL 3
GUEST SPEAKER: David Nemer (University of Virginia)
The Human Infrastructure of Misinformation: A Case Study of Brazil’s Heteromated Labor
In recent years, major technology companies have taken much of the public blame for this reality, given their algorithms facilitate the sharing of—and sometimes even promote—falsehoods. This, however, misses a key reality; social media, search engines, and messaging services are not fully automated technologies. Rather, they are heteromated: they are reliant on participatory humans to serve their economic goals. Focusing on users, and on the sharing, rather than the origination, of disinformation, we connect theories of heteromation with those surrounding the Human Infrastructure of Misinformation (HIM) with the express purpose of contributing to a more holistic understanding of how and why misinformation is so prevalent online.
Derek Curry (Northeastern University)
Generative AI is becoming cheaper, more accessible, and increasingly more capable of generating believable content. Efforts to prevent misuse of commercial AI services, sometimes called “guardrails,” have been demonstrated to be relatively easy to bypass by security researchers. And the availability of open-source models that can be downloaded and modified with consumer grade hardware makes it nearly impossible to ensure that the technology is not used for the large-scale production of disinformation content. Within this context, is content moderation still a viable approach? Or would it be more beneficial to focus on media literacies so that the public is capable of consuming digital content with criticality and skepticism?
John Wihbey (Northeastern University)
There is an AI arms race between offense and defense on social media, and defense will have the advantage. The technology’s defensive potential is particularly promising for decentralized platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky, where AI could empower local moderators through both backend assistance and AI-powered moderation bots. Despite the optimistic long-term outlook for AI in content moderation, there remains a significant challenge of “epistemic risk” where bad actors could use AI to degrade the information environment, creating feedback loops of lower-quality content that would require moderation algorithms to actively prioritize high-quality, authoritative sources to maintain ecosystem integrity.
Sina Fazelpour (Northeastern University)
Sanity checks for using generative AI in fact-checking. As misinformation grows increasingly widespread, fact-checking organizations are turning to AI algorithms to help identify which claims most urgently need verification. However, determining the appropriate “ground truth” for training and evaluating these algorithms remains challenging, given the various factors involved in prioritizing claims. While some organizations focus on verifying claims that are likely to attract broad public interest, others prioritize statements based on their probability of being false or their potential to harm vulnerable populations.
Moderator: Michael Ann DeVito (Northeastern University)
5:15-5:45: PERFORMANCE
Data Drums : A Rhythmic Call to Climate Action
Rahul Bhargava, Marcus Santos, Lily Gabaree
Data Drums is a live data sonification performance that brings global CO₂ emissions to life through the dynamic beats of a Brazilian-style drum ensemble. Based on carbon emissions from India, Brazil, and the USA, this four-part piece translates the data into rhythmic patterns, with each drum and its beats representing different parts of the data. The movements build from individual rhythms into complex layers, highlighting contrasts and connections between countries and sectors. Culminating in an interactive finale, the audience is invited to join in with their bodies, echoing collective responsibility and potential for climate action. This powerful, data-driven performance offers a unique fusion of music, science, and community engagement, creating an unforgettable experience that resonates with both urgency and hope.
5:45-6:00: CLOSING REMARKS
6:00-8:00: COCKTAIL PARTY