The Glass Room San Francisco - Speakers
The Glass Room San Francisco ran from 16 October to 3 November 2019 with over 21,000 visitors, a daily program of events, and over 50 artworks that playfully and provocatively explore our relationship to technology.
As part of our daily events program, we hosted leading journalists, researchers, technologists, and others, who delved deeper into the questions and issues raised in The Glass Room.
Artists
Nathan 'nash' Sheard
Nathan 'nash' Sheard is the Associate Director of Community Organizing at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. nash leads EFF's grassroots, student, and community organizing efforts. As the lead coordinator of the Electronic Frontier Alliance, nash works to support the Alliance's member organizations in educating their neighbors on digital-privacy best practices, and advocating for privacy and innovation protecting policy and legislation.
Having witnessed the results of aggressive and militarized policing in the United States, Honduras, and Palestine; and as a target of racial profiling, biased broken windows policing, and police brutality in his own life; nash has worked extensively to help activists and communities mitigate the damage of harmful interaction with law enforcement. nash co-founded Black Movement Law Project and is a founding member of Just Info, a 24-hour hot-line providing no-cost legal information in New York City. As a member of Mutant Legal, nash organized training's in New York, Ferguson, and other cities in crisis, on how to document police conduct, exercise legal rights, counteract state repression and actively participate in one's legal defense.
Program description for the talk 'Banning facial recognition' at The Glass Room San Francisco
Sharon A. Anolik, Esq., CIPP
Sharon Anolik is President of Privacy Panacea, a boutique firm providing guidance on data protection and enablement. Sharon advises corporate leaders and governments on privacy, information security and compliance program development and implementation, and conducts privacy and security due diligence in M&A transactions. A member of the Department of Homeland Security’s Data Privacy & Integrity Advisory Committee, a many-time Chief Privacy Officer (at McKesson, Blue Shield of California and Ask Jeeves), Sharon brings two decades of leadership experience in building privacy and compliance programs to prominent organizations. Sharon is Chair of the Compliance, Privacy & Audit Committee of El Camino Hospital’s Board of Directors; serves on the Future of Privacy Forum’s Advisory Board; is co-inventor of a privacy indicator method patent (pending); is a sought-after conference speaker; and is a Senior Technical Advisor to HBO’s “Silicon Valley”, consulting on privacy matters.
Karim Amer
Karim Amer is an Egyptian-American filmmaker best known for producing the Academy-Award nominated documentary, The Square (AL MIDAN) (2013). He also produced the award-winning documentary, Rafea: Solar Mama (2013), and teamed up with Angelina Jolie to executive produce the animated feature, The Breadwinner (2017). His most recent film, The Great Hack, premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and launched globally on Netflix this summer. He is currently in production on a documentary series for HBO about NXIVM.
Marvin Ammori
Marvin Ammori is the general counsel for Protocol Labs—a research, development, and deployment startup for projects improving and decentralizing the Internet. Mr. Ammori has been a leading intellectual voice on Internet policy issues such as net neutrality, user-generated content, and open source. He was the chief legal force behind the FCC's seminal Comcast/BitTorrent decision in 2008, the US’s most important net neutrality enforcement action. He also helped organize the online “Internet Blackout” movement that killed the SOPA copyright bill in 2012. In 2015, he led the advocacy resulting in the FCC’s historic decision to adopt strong "Title II" net neutrality rules.\ \ He worked on these issues as the General Counsel of Free Press, a civil rights advocacy organization and the head of a law firm that advised Apple, Google, Dropbox, Softbank, and others. He also spent two years as General Counsel of Virgin Hyperloop One. In 2018, he helped found and serves on the Board of the Blockchain Association, the cryptocurrency’s industry’s trade association comprised of Coinbase, Circle, Kraaken, ZCash, Gemini, and others. He also serves on the boards of two top organizations who work with millions of activists, Fight for the Future (as chairman) and Demand Progress. Mr. Ammori is a graduate of Harvard Law School and the University of Michigan. He has been affiliated with Stanford’s Center for Internet & Society for almost a decade.
Varoon Bashyakarla
Varoon Bashyakarla is a data scientist at Tactical Tech, where his work explores how personal data is used for political purposes. His past statistical undertakings led him to a variety of domains: public health, public safety, sports, finance, and cybersecurity. He worked as a Data Scientist at Wealthfront and in predictive modeling at Dropbox. He was a Fellow at the inaugural Eric and Wendy Schmidt Data Science for Social Good Fellowship, a Transatlantic Digital Debates fellow, and a recipient of The American Council on Germany's McCloy Fellowship on Global Trends.
Manuel Beltrán
Manuel Beltrán is an artist, activist and researcher. He researches and lectures on contemporary art, activism, contemporary social movements, post-digital culture and new media. As an activist, he was involved in the Indignados movement in Spain, the Gezi Park protests in Turkey and several forms of independent activism and cyber-activism in Europe and beyond. His work in The Glass Room, Data Production Labour, gives visitors the chance to become part of the big-data economy just by scrolling through their social media feeds.
Dieter Bohn
The Vergecast is coming to The Glass Room with a live podcast recording on October 31st at 7:30PM. Hosts Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn will be joined by Google Pixel camera product manager Isaac Reynolds, Instagram head of product Robby Stein, and Verge senior reporter Ashley Carman to talk about how the photos we share influence the photos we take — and vice versa. We can promise Halloween jokes, but not costumes (though your finery is welcome). Stick around after the recording for a reception and birthday toast with Nilay and Dieter — The Verge turns eight on November 1st!
Sean Captain
Sean Captain is a Bay Area technology, science and business journalist. He currently writes for sites including Fast Company and Tom’s Guide. Sean has written and edited for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Popular Science, PC World, Slate and many others. He began his work life as an environmental policy analyst and remains a bit of a policy wonk.
Chris DiBona
Chris DiBona joined Google in 2004 and oversees a variety of programs across Google, heading the Open Source Programs Office. He is an internationally known expert in the field of open source software and related methodologies and he has his masters in software engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. Additionally, Chris is a technical advisor to the UK-based Royal United Services Institute. Until 2018, Chris also served on the United States Commerce Department's Data Advisory Council (CDAC).\ \ Chris is a published author and former editor and podcast host. Chris can occasionally be found in the background of HBO's 'Silicon Valley’ where he is a senior technical advisor and he's recently helped with FX's ‘Devs’. Hilariously, when Mozilla was hosted at Google on Landings Drive through 2009, he would make sure they had the right brand of cereal and fresh cherries in their microkitchen.
Renée Diresta
Renée DiResta is a 2019 Mozilla Fellow in Media, Misinformation, and Trust. She investigates the spread of malign narratives across social networks, and assists policymakers in understanding and responding to the problem. She has advised Congress, the State Department, and other academic, civic, and business organizations, and has studied disinformation and computational propaganda in the context of pseudoscience conspiracies, terrorism, and state-sponsored information warfare.
Renée regularly writes and speaks about the role that tech platforms and curatorial algorithms play in the proliferation of disinformation and conspiracy theories. She is an Ideas contributor at Wired. Her tech industry writing, analysis, talks, and data visualizations have been featured or covered by numerous media outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg, Fast Company, Politico, TechCrunch, Wired, Slate, Forbes, Buzzfeed, The Economist, Journal of Commerce, and more. She is a 2019 Truman National Security Project security fellow and a Council on Foreign Relations term member.
Renée is the author of The Hardware Startup: Building your Product, Business, and Brand, published by O’Reilly Media.
Jonathan Dotan
Supervising Producer, HBO SILICON VALLEY
Fellow and Lecturer, Stanford University
Jonathan is currently prepping the next season of HBO’s Emmy Award-winning series, SILICON VALLEY, on which he’s worked for six seasons as a writer/producer. There he leads a team of over 200 experts to the show’s dialog and plot tracks to the real and surreal world of technology. Alongside his film and television work, he is a Fellow at Stanford’s Center for Blockchain Research and the Stanford Compression Forum, working on applied strategy and policy for distributed ledger technologies. His teaching at the Stanford Graduate School of Business examines technology governance and the new prospects a decentralized Internet.
Marshall Erwin
Marshall Erwin is Senior Director of Trust & Security at Mozilla. His work helps ensure Mozilla protects its users and builds a better Internet through privacy and security initiatives. He began his career in the intelligence community as a counterterrorism and cybersecurity analyst. He also served as the counterterrorism and intelligence adviser to Senator Susan Collins on the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee and as the intelligence specialist at the Congressional Research Service.
Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus Farivar is an investigative tech reporter at NBC News in San Francisco. In addition to being a radio producer and author, Cyrus was most recently a senior tech policy reporter at Ars Technica. Cyrus is the author of multiple books, including Habeas Data (2018) and The Internet of Elsewhere (2011). Praised by The New Yorker, among others, Habeas Data takes a look at legal cases that have had an outsized impact on surveillance law in America. His first book focuses on the history and effects of the Internet on different countries around the world.\ \ Cyrus has also reported for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio, Public Radio International, The Economist, Wired, The New York Times, Slate, and many others.
Watch the talk 'Without Warrant: Surveillance at U.S. Borders' at The Glass Room San Francisco
Sidney Fussell
Sidney Fussell is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers technology.
Watch the talk 'Tech Workers, Organize! ' at The Glass Room San Francisco
Rob Girling
As a co-CEO and co-Founder of strategy and design firm Artefact, Rob Girling is responsible for setting the company’s strategy and vision: using the power of design to make change and do good. Rob’s design career spans some of the leading agencies and design brands in the world, such as Apple, Microsoft, IDEO and Sony. Rob has shared his point of view on responsible design at conferences around the world, including SXSW, IxDA, World Forum for Democracy, DMI Design Leadership Conference, and more.
Watch the talk 'Designing Ethical Technology' at The Glass Room San Francisco
April Glaser
April Glaser is a journalist at Slate, where she primarily covers the technology industry. Her work has appeared in Recode, Wired, Logic Magazine, and elsewhere. Prior to journalism, April previously also worked at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and various other tech policy nonprofits.
Watch the talk 'When the internet broke' at The Glass Room San Francisco
Bulbul Gupta
Bulbul is the new CEO of Pacific Community Ventures, a nonprofit that invests in small businesses and making markets work for social good. Most recently she was Founding Advisor at Socos, an independent, for-profit think tank, that explores the future of human potential. Its “mad science” toolkit integrates a wide variety of methodologies with advising for private and public policy in the future of work & workers. Bulbul is the former Head of Market-Based Approaches for the Clinton Global Initiative.
www.pacificcommunityventures.org
Watch the talk 'Designing Ethical Technology' at The Glass Room San Francisco
Stephanie Hankey
Stephanie Hankey is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of Tactical Tech. Alongside Marek Tuszynski, she founded the organization in 2003 and together they co-curated The Glass Room in Berlin, New York, London, and San Francisco. Stephanie is a designer, technologist, and activist who has been working internationally at the intersection of technology, human rights, and civil liberties for the past 20 years. She is the co-founder of the creative agency Tactical Studios and the co-curator of the exhibition Nervous Systems. In 2016-17 she was an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and in 2017 she was made a Visiting Industry Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. Stephanie has a degree in the History of Design and Art from Manchester Metropolitan University and a Masters in Computer Related Design from the Royal College of Art, London.
Queena Kim
Queena leads the team providing KQED's weekend news coverage. As the Weekend Editor she also edits and co-produces KQED's podcast Q'ed Up that dives deep into one story over weeks and months. Previously she was Senior Editor of the Silicon Valley Desk and Senior Reporter covering technology at Marketplace. Before NPR, Queena was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal and on the founding editorial team of The Bay Citizen.
Watch the talk 'Designing Ethical Technology' at The Glass Room San Francisco
Judy Korin
Judy Korin is the Producer of The Great Hack. Judy fuses her backgrounds in graphic design and filmmaking to contribute to visually powerful and socially impactful works. Her credits include the documentaries Bending the Arc (as Co-Producer) and A Century of Women (as Director; IDA and Emmy award nominee), as well as the indie scripted feature film Finding Neighbors (as Producer). Judy has directed and produced many short-form documentaries and branded content films for social justice and educational non-profits such as the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, Los Angeles Community Action Network, and Students Run LA.
Pedro Kos
Pedro Kos is an award winning director and editor. His feature documentary directorial debut Bending the Arc (co-directed with Kief Davidson) premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival.
His previous work as an editor includes Jehane Noujaim’s Academy Award nominee The Square, which earned Pedro an Emmy Award for Best Editing for a Non-Fiction program, Lucy Walker’s Academy Award nominee Waste Land, Jon Shenk’s The Island President (2011 Toronto Film Festival Documentary People’s Choice Award winner) and Ms. Walker’s The Crash Reel (2013 SXSW Film Festival Audience Award winner). His prior work also includes Elemental, directed by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee and Gayatri Roshan, and Freida Mock’s Sing China!, on both of which he also served as 2nd Unit Director. He also served as the 2nd unit director on Jessica Sanders’ March of the Living.
Mary L. Gray
Mary L. Gray is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. She is also a Fellow at Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics and a Faculty Affiliate with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Mary maintains a faculty position in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering with affiliations in Anthropology, Gender Studies, and the Media School, at Indiana University. Mary studies how technology access, material conditions, and everyday uses of tech transform people’s lives. Mary chairs the Microsoft Research Ethics Review Program and is a leading expert in the emerging field of AI and ethics, particularly research methods at the intersections of computer and social sciences.
Watch the talk 'Ghost Work - Discussion with the Author' at The Glass Room San Francisco
Dave Maass
Dave Maass is a senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a visiting professor of media technology at the University of Nevada, Reno's Reynolds School of Journalism. Prior to joining EFF, he worked as an investigative reporter for alternative newsweeklies across the Southwest.
Alexis Madrigal
Alexis Madrigal is a staff writer with The Atlantic. He’s working on a book that is an Oaklandish history of Silicon Valley.
Watch the talk 'When the internet broke' at The Glass Room San Francisco
Jessica McKellar
Jessica McKellar is a founder and the CTO of Pilot.com, a bookkeeping firm powered by software. She is a Forbes 30 under 30 recipient in the enterprise software category and an O’Reilly Open Source Award winner, who speaks internationally about diversity and inclusion in open source communities. She holds a masters degree in Computer Science as well as bachelors degrees in Computer Science and Chemistry from MIT.\ \ Open source meets criminal justice reform in Jessica’s work with The Last Mile, a job training and re-entry program that has implemented the first computer programming curriculum inside US prisons. She teaches Python at San Quentin State Prison in California, hires formerly incarcerated software engineers, and uses that bridge between the tech industry and prisons to get people activated and acting for decarceration.
Tejas Narechania
Tejas N. Narechania is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where he teaches courses on telecommunications regulation, intellectual property, and property. He is also a Faculty Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology.
Casey Newton
The Verge’s Silicon Valley Editor, Casey Newton, reports from the front lines of the huge tech firms that are shaping the future. His groundbreaking reporting on the plight of content moderators at Facebook ignited a national conversation about technology policy and how we keep the internet safe. More recently, he published two hours of leaked audio from internal Facebook meetings. Casey’s popular daily newsletter, The Interface, explores the intersection of social media and democracy.
The Interface with Casey Newton
The Interface with Casey Newton
Watch the talk 'The Interface' at The Glass Room San Francisco
Nilay Patel
Editor-in-Chief, The Verge.
Joe Rivano Barros
Joe Rivano Barros is a campaign manager at The Worker Agency, where he works on various campaigns involving tech ethics and migration. He's been helping organize Mijente's #NoTechforICE campaign targeting Palantir and other companies that contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement for more than a year to pressure them to cancel their contracts. He's a former reporter who lives in San Francisco.
Watch the talk 'Tech Workers, Organize! ' at The Glass Room San Francisco
Sarah Roberts
Dr. Sarah T. Roberts is an assistant professor of Information Studies at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, specializing in Internet culture, social media, and the intersection of media, technology and society. She is founding co-director, along with Dr. Safiya Noble, of the forthcoming UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry.\ \ Roberts researches information work and workers, and is a leading global authority on “commercial content moderation,” the term she coined to describe the work of those responsible for making sure media content posted to commercial websites fit within legal, ethical, and the site’s own guidelines and standards. She is frequently consulted on matters of policy, worker welfare, and governance related to content moderation issues and the broader social media landscape.\ \ She is a 2018 Carnegie Fellow and winner of the 2018 EFF Barlow Pioneer Award in recognition of her work on commercial content moderation.\ \ Her book, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media, was released in June 2019 (Yale University Press).
Tracy Rosenberg
Tracy Rosenberg has worked as Media Alliance's Executive Director since 2007. She has organized and advocated for a free, accountable and accessible media system, focusing on the protection and sustainability of alternative media outlets monitored the mainstream media for accuracy and fair representation and facilitated the training of numerous nonprofit organizations and citizen's groups in effective communications. She blogs on media policy and privacy rights and is published frequently around the country. She currently sits on the board of the Alliance for Community Media Western Region, serves on the anchor committee of the Media Action Grassroots Network and co-coordinates Oakland Privacy. Oakland Privacy's work at the frontier of civil and human rights and the surveillance state was recently honored with a 2019 Pioneer Award.
Program description for the talk 'Banning facial recognition' at The Glass Room San Francisco
Ashkan Soltani
Ashkan Soltani is an independent researcher and technologist specializing in privacy, security, and behavioral economics. His work draws attention to privacy problems online, demystifies technology for the non-technically inclined, and provides data-driven insights to help inform policy. He’s previously served a brief stint as a Senior Advisor to the U.S. Chief Technology Officer in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and as the Chief Technologist for the Federal Trade Commission. Most recently, Ashkan was one of the architects of the sweeping privacy legislation, the California Consumer Privacy Act, that passed in California in 2018.
Program description for the event 'Tech Policy Happy Hour' at The Glass Room San Francisco
Clara Tsao
Clara Tsao is a national security and technology entrepreneur. Clara has been a Fellow with the Mozilla Foundation examining the impact of policies related to content moderation, online disinformation, and terrorist content. Clara is also a non-resident fellow with the German Marshall Fund focused on election security and foreign influence operations. Tsao previously served as the Senior Advisor for Emerging Technology at the Department of Homeland Security and as Chief Technology Officer of the US Government’s Countering Violent Extremism and Countering Foreign Influence Task Force. Over the course of her career Tsao has worked across companies including Apple, AT&T, and Microsoft. Tsao is also the President of the Board of the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows Foundation.
Watch the talk 'Crisis in content moderation' at The Glass Room San Francisco
Marek Tuszynski
Marek Tuszynski is the Creative Director and co-founder of Tactical Tech, and the co-curator of The Glass Room. Marek produces creative and social interventions that span various media, from film and radio to television, books, exhibitions and the web. For the past 25 years, he has been working at the nexus of technology and politics, information and activism and the consequences of living in a quantified society. Marek’s most recent documentary series for Tactical Tech, Exposing the Invisible explores the digital tools and tactics that now enable evidence-based activism to thrive on an unprecedented scale. Marek is also co-founder of the creative agency Tactical Studios, co-curator of the exhibition Nervous Systems: Quantified Life and the Social Question and co-author of the Visualising Information for Advocacy and Efficiency And Madness.
Watch the talk 'Investigation is a mindset' at The Glass Room San Francisco
Sameena Usman
Sameena serves as Government Relations Coordinator for the San Francisco Bay Area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and a board member for Secure Justice. She advocates for legislation impacting civil rights, privacy protections, and an equitable society. In her meetings with Bay Area elected officials, she highlights issues facing the Muslim community, including hate incidences and civil right complaints received by the office. She actively works to build bridges with communities, conducts interfaith dialogue, educates youth, and empowers the American Muslim community. Sameena has been interviewed by dozens of local, national, and international news outlets.
Sameena was awarded the Community Hero award from Assemblyman Kansen Chu and Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Leadership awards by Congressman Ro Khanna and then Assemblyman Wieckowski.
Program description for the talk 'Banning facial recognition' at The Glass Room San Francisco
Danja Vasiliev
Danja Vasiliev is working with digital systems, networks and software. His research and practice aimed at re-examination and exploitation of Network paradigms in physical and digital realms. Danja experiments with methods, tactics and techniques that question communication models established between Users and Systems. In October 2011, together with his colleagues Danja Vasiliev coauthored The Critical Engineering Manifesto.
Jacob Ward
Jacob Ward is technology correspondent for NBC News, where he reports on-air for Nightly News, The TODAY Show, MSNBC. The former editor-in-chief of Popular Science magazine, Ward was Al Jazeera’s science and technology correspondent from 2013 to 2018, and has hosted investigative documentaries for Discovery, National Geographic, and PBS. As a writer, Ward has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and many other publications. His ten-episode Audible podcast, Complicated, discusses humanity’s most difficult problems, and he’s the host of an upcoming four-hour public television series, “Hacking Your Mind,” about human decision making and irrationality. Ward is a 2018-2019 Berggruen Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, where he’s writing The Loop: Decision Technology and How to Resist It, due for publication by Hachette Book Group in 2020. The book explores how artificial intelligence and other decision-shaping technologies will amplify good and bad human instincts.
Program description for the talk 'Banning facial recognition' at The Glass Room San Francisco
Şerife Wong
Şerife Wong is a Turkish Hawaiian artist and founder of Icarus Salon, an art think tank researching the ethics of emerging technology. In 2019, she was a resident at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center thematic month on AI, a jury member at Ars Electronica for the European Commission’s STARTS prize, and partnered with the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University to create Fluxus Landscape, a map of 500 actors in AI ethics and governance. Previously, she was both an Artist in Residence and Impact Program Manager at Autodesk’s Pier 9, worked at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Artnet Magazine. Şerife advocates for justice in AI and pushes for more active roles for artists in academia, industry, and government. Currently, she is working on a counter-narrative AI policy observatory.
Watch the talk 'Tech Workers, Organize! ' at The Glass Room San Francisco