About

The MOSAICS Symposium brings together scholars from the humanities, social sciences, information science, and the arts for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary dialogue on AI and mind, mentalité, data ontologies, postcolonialism, social hierarchies, power imbalances, inequality and intersections (race, class, caste, gender, disability), cultural meanings, infrastructures, landscapes, work, users, human and machine interaction, reappropriations, resistances, and adjacent topics and themes.

MOSAICS Initiative 

AI is at once a tool of surveillance and policing, a military weapon, a powerful instrument of scientific investigation, and a technology capable of changing human behavior and inflicting trauma. Grasping these and other social and epistemic valences of AI, as well as understanding its technical design and how social values and priorities bear upon its algorithms, training models, and data sets is akin to assembling multiple pieces of mosaics. Humans for millennia have pieced together mosaics, creatively placing fragments toward a larger whole and broader meanings. Viewers approach mosaics with different minds and vantage points, seeing different patterns and purposes. Similarly, understanding the complexity of AI in our world requires piecing together varied perspectives and engaging in interdisciplinary conversation. CBI’s MOSAICS Initiative and Symposium are forums for this kind of sustained, critical and interdisciplinary engagement from humanities, arts, and social sciences.