Responsible DS + AI Speaker Series: Lindah Kotut, University of Washington

Lindah Kotut seminar

Lindah Kotut, assistant professor in the Information School at the University of Washington, will present "Amplifying the Griot: (Ancient) Stories Guiding the Design of Fair, Equitable and Transparent Systems."

Lindah Kotut is an assistant professor at the University of Washington. She holds a PhD in computer science from Virginia Tech. Her research while pursuing the doctorate sat at the crossroads of Human Computer Interaction, privacy and security. She looked at how people tell stories both online and offline to understand needs. Using narrative theories, and stories structures as both guides and metaphors, she considered what stories are told, why they are told—to understand unmet needs. She also looked at how the stories are told to understand technology applications. She contributed by providing research guidelines towards Respectful Technology Spaces that guides how we go about retelling user stories and how we design technologies that amplify the stories. She used both NLP and Machine Learning to understand stories and to guide approaches to craft supportive, collaborative, interventive and persuasive technology to support decision making and storytelling surrounding different domains, including user privacy. She also holds a master's degree in computer science from Norfolk State University and an undergraduate degree in computer science from Georgia Southern University.

Selected publications:

Kotut, L., & McCrickard, S. (2022). The TL;DR Charter: Speculatively Demystifying Privacy Policy Documents and Terms Agreements. In GROUP ’22: ACM Conference on Supporting Group Work, January 23–26, 2022, Sanibel Island, FL. ACM, New York, NY, USA.

Kotut, L., Bhatti, N., Saaty, M., Haqq, D., Stelter, T. L., & McCrickard, D. S. (2020). Clash of Times: Respectful Technology Space for Integrating Community Stories in Intangible Exhibits. Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Join via Zoom

Meeting ID: 870 1629 3110
Password: 810135

Questions? Contact Janet Eke

The Responsible Data Science and AI Speaker Series discusses topics such as explainability, reproducibility, biases, data curation and governance, and privacy.  The series is co-organized by Associate Professor Jana Diesner and Assistant Professor Nigel Bosch at the iSchool at Illinois and hosted by the iSchool's Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS). 

This event is sponsored by Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship