Information Access Seminar

New Directions in Tech Governance

Friday, October 18, 2024
3:10 pm - 5:00 pm PDT

Deirdre Mulligan

While Congress continued to study the risks and possibilities of AI, the Biden-Harris Administration took bold action: driving agency actions to address risks to civil rights, equity, competition, economic opportunity, and national security; establishing new federal guidance to guide agency development, use, and procurement of AI, and a new AI Safety Institute; and boosting the capacity of government to use and regulate AI by bringing in new tech and tech-related talent and driving public and private investments in the growing public interest tech ecosystem. 

Drawing on my eighteen months of service in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during the Biden-Harris Administration, I will describe key AI initiatives and, drawing on my prior research, describe how these initiatives pave the way for the government to purposefully use technology to embed values or set policy — what I call “governance-by-design” — in a manner that supports fundamental democratic governance norms of intentional, deliberative, participatory, and expert public decision making, free from capture or caprice, and centers the public's rights and safety over private interests. 

Lastly, I will explain why these new directions in tech governance make growing the cultural and institutional supports for public service across the computing field an important shared national priority.


This seminar will be held both online & in person. You are welcome to join us either in South Hall or via Zoom.

For online participants

Online participants must have a Zoom account and be logged in. Sign up for your free account here. If this is your first time using Zoom, please allow a few extra minutes to download and install the browser plugin or mobile app.

Join the seminar online

Speaker

Deirdre K. Mulligan is a professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, and served for the past 18 months in the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) as deputy U.S. chief technology officer for policy.

Muliigan is also a faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, a co-organizer of the Algorithmic Fairness & Opacity Working Group, an affiliated faculty on the Hewlett funded Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, and a faculty advisor to the Center for Technology, Society & Policy. Mulligan’s research explores legal and technical means of protecting values such as privacy, freedom of expression, and fairness in emerging technical systems.  Her book, Privacy on the Ground: Driving Corporate Behavior in the United States and Europe, a study of privacy practices in large corporations in five countries, conducted with UC Berkeley Law Prof. Kenneth Bamberger was recently published by MIT Press.  Mulligan and  Bamberger received the 2016 International Association of Privacy Professionals Leadership Award for their research contributions to the field of privacy protection.  She is a member of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Information Science and Technology study group (ISAT); and, a member of the National Academy of Science Forum on Cyber Resilience. She is past-Chair of the Board of Directors of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a leading advocacy organization protecting global online civil liberties and human rights; an initial board member of the Partnership on AI; a founding member of the standing committee for the AI 100 project; and a founding member of the Global Network Initiative, a multi-stakeholder initiative to protect and advance freedom of expression and privacy in the ICT sector, and in particular to resist government efforts to use the ICT sector to engage in censorship and surveillance in violation of international human rights standards. She recently served as a Commissioner on the Oakland Privacy Advisory Commission and helped to develop a local ordinance providing oversight of surveillance technology. Mulligan chaired a series of interdisciplinary visioning workshops on Privacy by Design with the Computing Community Consortium to develop a shared interdisciplinary research agenda. Prior to joining the School of Information. she was a Clinical Professor of Law, founding Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, and Director of Clinical Programs at the UC Berkeley School of Law.

Mulligan was the policy lead for the NSF-funded TRUST Science and Technology Center, which brought together researchers at U.C. Berkeley, Carnegie-Mellon University, Cornell University, Stanford University, and Vanderbilt University; and a PI on the multi-institution NSF funded ACCURATE center.  In 2007 she was a member of an expert team charged by the California Secretary of State to conduct a top-to-bottom review of the voting systems certified for use in California elections. This review investigated the security, accuracy, reliability and accessibility of electronic voting systems used in California. She was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Authentication Technology and Its Privacy Implications; the Federal Trade Commission's Federal Advisory Committee on Online Access and Security, and the National Task Force on Privacy, Technology, and Criminal Justice Information. She was a vice-chair of the California Bipartisan Commission on Internet Political Practices and chaired the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy (CFP) Conference in 2004. She co-chaired Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Academic Advisory Board with Fred B. Schneider, from 2003-2014. Prior to Berkeley, she served as staff counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington, D.C.

Last updated: October 2, 2024