The Covid-19 pandemic pushed many countries to employ novel methods for distributing aid to impacted communities, including new data-driven technological approaches. Using social impact scenarios, Zoe Kahn and Joshua Blumenstock’s research examines the unanticipated dynamics that may arise from data-driven technical policies. Looking at Togo’s scheme to provide aid via a data-driven system based on recipients’ mobile money accounts, they reveal 3 unanticipated dynamics in this approach that would potentially negatively impact who receives aid as well as how the target community perceives this policy.
Zoe Kahn
Zoe Kahn is a PhD candidate at the UC Berkeley School of Information. Her research explores how AI/ML systems may result in unanticipated dynamics, including harms, to people and society. To do so, she currently uses qualitative methods to understand the perspectives and experiences of impacted communities. In this research, Kahn also uses storytelling to influence the design of technical systems and the policies that surround its use. She has conducted fieldwork in rural communities in the United States, worked on issues of homelessness in the Bay Area, and is currently working on a project that uses data-intensive methods to allocate humanitarian aid to people in Togo who are living in extreme poverty. Kahn's research has received funding from the SSRC’s Just Tech Covid-19 Rapid-Response Grant; UC Berkeley Algorithmic, Fairness, and Opacity Group; UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, and UC Berkeley Center for Technology, Society, and Policy.