Margaret M. Burnett "Mission: To enable diverse mere mortals to assess an AI agent’s “goodness” for their own needs"
Speaker: Margaret M. Burnett
Event type: Guest lecture
Event time: 12.5.2025 14:00-15:00 (Helsinki Time Zone UTC+3)
Place: University of Helsinki Main building, Fabianinkatu 33 Pieni juhlasali
The next lecture in the Helsinki Distinguished Lecture Series on Future Information Technology will be given by Professor Margaret M. Burnett. Burnett is a Professor of Computer Science in the School of EECS at Oregon State University.
Abstract
As AI agents become more and more prevalent in everyday technology, more and more individuals — from every walk of life, at every level of education, across the entire socioeconomic spectrum, of every gender, race, ethnicity and age — will need to make decisions about which agent(s) to use, when and how, and to what extent using them is the best path forward. The “mission” this talk explores is how we can enable such diverse individuals to make such decisions in ways that make their lives better instead of worse. For example, should I use an agent to enable me to be a remote caregiver for my grandmother, or should I move in with her? Should I buy semi-self-driving car X, or semi-self-driving car Y, or stay entirely manual? Will using one of these systems cost someone’s life? Will it so destroy someone’s privacy that their lives become filled with fear and harassment? Will my child become less intelligent over time if I give her access to LLM-powered “homework helpers”?
In this talk, I don’t show how to answer any of these questions. But I show a few paths forward that may point to way(s) toward answering them, and at least one path on how not to answer them.
About the Speaker
Margaret Burnett is a Distinguished Professor at Oregon State University. She began her career in industry, where she was the first woman software developer ever hired at Procter & Gamble Ivorydale. A few degrees and start-ups later, she joined academia, with a research focus on people who are engaged in some form of software development. She was the principal architect of the Forms/3 and FAR visual programming languages, and co-founded the area of end-user software engineering, which aims to improve software for computer users who are not trained in programming. Her end-user software engineering work included producing seminal work in actionably explaining AI to ordinary end users. She co-leads the team that created the GenderMag method (a software inspection process that uncovers gender inclusiveness issues in software), the SocioeconomicMag method, the InclusiveMag meta-method, and a new analytical approach to intersectionally inclusive software.
Burnett is an ACM Fellow, a member of the ACM CHI Academy, and an award-winning mentor. She has served in over 50 conference organization and program committee roles, and is currently on the Editorial Board of ACM TOSEM and ACM TiiS. She was recently honored with the IEEE CS TCSE Distinguished Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) Leadership Award and the Grace Hopper Conference’s ABIE Tech Leader Award. Website: https://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~burnett/