GPPN: Thinking Public Policy Webinar Series
Artificial Intelligence in Elections:
challenges and opportunities
featuring faculty from Hertie, LKYSPP and SIPA
Tuesday, 10 September 2024
7am New York | 8am São Paulo | 12pm London | 1pm Paris/Berlin
7pm Singapore | 8pm Tokyo
What are the impacts of artificial intelligence on electoral processes worldwide? AI technologies, such as machine learning and natural language processing, are being increasingly utilized in election campaigns for voter outreach, targeted advertising, and data analysis. These tools enable political campaigns to engage with voters more effectively and tailor messages to specific demographics, potentially increasing voter turnout and engagement.
However, there are also significant challenges posed by AI in elections. Among the main concerns are the potential for AI-driven misinformation and deepfakes, which could manipulate public opinion and disrupt the democratic process. Additionally, there are ethical implications of using AI for voter profiling and data privacy issues, emphasizing the need for regulatory frameworks to ensure transparency and fairness in AI applications within electoral contexts.
How can AI be used to strengthen electoral integrity and safeguard democratic processes? Join our expert panelists in this fifth webinar of the GPPN: Thinking Public Policy series, and hear their take on the impact and consequences of the use of AI in elections worldwide.
Speaker
Andrea Römmele
Andrea Römmele is Dean of Executive Education and Professor of Communication in Politics and Civil Society at the Hertie School. Her research interests are comparative political communications, political parties and public affairs. She was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Modern German Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2012/13 and has been a visiting fellow at the Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC, and the Australian National University in Canberra.
Römmele is co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal for Political Consulting and Policy Advice and also works as a consultant to political and corporate campaigns. She obtained her master's degree from the San Francisco University within a Cross-Registration Program with the University of California at Berkeley, a PhD from Heidelberg University and a habilitation from the Free University of Berlin.
Speaker
Eduardo Araral
Eduardo Araral is both an academic and a practitioner with over 30 years-experience in academia and government. He holds a PhD Degree in Public Policy from Indiana University-Bloomington. As an academic, he specializes in the study of institutions for collective action. He has published in several top-ranked journals and was ranked in the top 2% of most cited scholars worldwide in a study by Stanford University. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), Stanford University. He received the Ostrom Prize for the Governance of the Commons, a Fulbright PhD award, and a Presidential Award for Outstanding Overseas Filipinos. His work has been cited by the President of the National University of Singapore.
As a practitioner, Ed has a large and active portfolio of government advisory, consultancy, executive education and media engagement. He served as advisor to governments in Indonesia, the Philippines, Brunei, Vietnam, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Myanmar. He has undertaken 20 consultancy projects for the Asian Development Bank, World Bank, UNDP, Microsoft, Amazon, General Electric, Huawei, Apple, Garena, local governments and NGOs. He has also lectured in more than 250 Executive Education Programs for more than 6,000 government officials - Ministers, Permanent Secretaries, Directors, City Commissioners, Mayors, Academic and NGO leaders, CEOs of multinationals and ranking military officers - from more than 50 countries throughout Asia, Russia, and Africa. He has extensive media engagement including with the BBC, CNBC, Bloomberg, Financial Times, The Economist Intelligence Unit, Foreign Affairs, China Daily, Al Jazeera, Straits Times, Channel News Asia, South China Morning Post, among others.
Speaker
Camille François
Camille François specializes in how organized actors use digital technologies to harm society and individuals. Her work to understand and mitigate digital harms spans from cyber conflict to online harassment. She has advised governments and parliamentary committees on both sides of the Atlantic—from investigating Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election on behalf of the U.S. Senate Select Intelligence Committee, to leading the French government’s recent inquiry into the economic opportunities and social challenges presented by the metaverse.
Camille has developed and implemented a number of methodological innovations in the field of Trust & Safety. During her time as Principal Researcher at Google, she led a new approach to countering violent extremism online. She is the author of the “Actor-Behavior-Content framework” which influenced how major platforms approach online content moderation, and was among the first to document the phenomenon of government-backed networked harassment (“patriotic trolling”). At the Algorithmic Justice League (AJL), she co-led the development of bug bounties for algorithmic harms.
Camille serves on the adjunct faculty of the Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. She is an affiliate scholar of the Harvard Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society, a PhD candidate at the French Institute of Geopolitics, a Fulbright scholar and a Young Leader of the French-American Foundation. She holds a Masters in Human Rights from the French Institute of Political Sciences (Sciences-Po) and a Masters in International Security from Columbia University.
In 2019, Camille was distinguished by the MIT Tech Review in the "35 Innovators Under 35" annual award in the "Visionary" category for her work leveraging data science to detect and analyze deceptive campaigns at scale. She was also distinguished by TIME magazine as one of the 100 next most influential people in the world, for her work on Trust & Safety.