Mozilla Festival 2021 (March 8th – 19th, 2021)

Mozilla Festival 2021 (March 8th – 19th, 2021)

Truth as a Public Good

Since October 2020, the Truth as a Public Good Working Group has been exploring the “dilemma” of standardized content and data authentication and the stakeholders involved in this decision-making ecosystem. Content authentication, evaluating the integrity of shared multimedia content, is crucial in the era of increasing erosion of the public’s trust in media and information sources.

Truth as a Public Good will be examined in the context of the Covid-19 vaccine story and how it relates to the public’s right to authenticating public health data. Truth as a Public Good will anchor this concept in the public’s shared experience of observing development of the Covid-19 Vaccine. This working group will host a World Cafe style workshop to examine authentication layers.


What is the goal and/or outcome of your session?:

The overarching goals of the authentication examinations will be to:
1) tell a significant story that is both highly relevant and accessible to society today
2) have a useful and accessible output
3) engage with stakeholders directly - we'd like to include relevant stakeholders stationary at their respective "tables" to anchor the workshop in a real-world lived experience - these stakeholders might include professionals, experts, academic researchers as well as those who will be most directly implicated in the solutions.

We're hoping that many efforts and discussions will continue after Mozfest. Share any ideas you already have for how to continue the work from your session.:

Thus far, we've designed the thematic areas to be broken up into different "layers" of authentication examinations such as i) infrastructure/Internet pipelines, ii) hardware/devices,iii) software/apps, iv) data, v) shared content OR perhaps by centering a different issue areas such as i) Covid vaccines, ii) health-wearables, iii) manipulated imagery, iv) Internet pipelines in the Global South, v) making health data accessible and understandable to patients. Our goal is to continue centering different types of authentication examinations over time to build consensus around guiding principles and develop a toolkit that is representative of our collective ideals for TaPG in line with the Trustworthy AI theme.

How will you deal with varying numbers of participants in your session?:

We know the format of the workshop (~World Cafe); however, we'd like to leave a degree of fluidity for the content/thematic areas since we intend to test this workshop format and concept at least once before the larger event during one of our weekly meetings. This will help us better understand what can be achieved in an hour with this format and iterate the workshop design accordingly.

Research @ NYU Abu Dhabi Laboratory for Computer-Human Intelligence

BS (summa cum laude) in electrical engineering from NYUAD. 2019 Summer Research Fellow at NYU. Rhodes Scholar, MSc in Computer Science at Oxford. Interests: clinical AI and digital health.