Diversity & Inclusion Events

D&I Invited Talk: An Intersectional Approach to Data Governance
by Marie Plamondon

Abstract:Data is not neutral and is a form of power. It is the product of decisions made by different actors who place different values on data while, in many cases, relevant actors are structurally underrepresented in decision-making. Harms that can result from careless use of data are now well documented (e.g. invasion of privacy, loss of autonomy, bias, and discrimination) and their consequences on individuals and communities are real. This is where data governance comes in. It encompasses all the factors that influence data decisions (e.g. whether to acquire the data; how to consider the differentiated needs of the population). It must balance the protection of individual rights, communities, and groups from harm with the societal value sought for its uses throughout the data lifecycle. This is why responsible, effective, and collaborative data governance is essential to shaping sustainable communities. Drawing upon Open North’s work, a non-profit organization with unique expertise on issues of data governance and management in the public interest, this keynote speech will explore why an intersectional approach to data governance is necessary to name and challenge forms of oppression and inequalities, as well as learnings.

Marie Plamondon is a Senior Analyst at Open North, a non-profit helping communities create and implement their open data, data governance, and open smart city initiatives. Marie’s involvement in various projects at Open North has fuelled her interest in how open smart cities and data governance help shape sustainable communities. She is currently working on the Data Governance Workstream for Montréal in Common, the City of Montréal’s smart city program. It brings together an innovation community whose partners are experimenting with technological solutions in food access, mobility, and municipal regulations, thanks to the $50 million prize awarded to the city by the Government of Canada as part of the Smart Cities Challenge. Marie also offers guidance to identify data governance mechanisms compatible with the open science philosophy of PULSAR, a sustainable health databank spearheaded by Université Laval, in a project funded by the International Observatory on the Societal Impacts of AI and Digital Technology. She was a conference speaker at the Canadian Open Data Summit, Nantes Digital Week, and Montréal Digital Week to present Open North’s approach to data governance.
In her spare time, Marie is involved in a bilateral cooperation project between the cities of Montréal and Nantes to co-create a Manifesto on future digital challenges. She also volunteered for Techaide to mobilize the Montréal tech community in raising funds for Centraide of Greater Montréal to break the cycle of poverty and social exclusion. Prior to Open North, Marie worked as a community organizer in Canada and the United Kingdom in various programs that raised her awareness of multiple issues related to colonialism, mental health, domestic violence, social isolation, and homelessness, among others. She holds an Honors B.A. in International Development Studies from McGill University and an MSc in International Public Policy from University College London (UCL).

Diversity and Inclusion Panel
D&I Perspectives around the World

Moderators

The EDBT/ICDT community believes that diversity and a culture of support encourage retention and attract talent, promote diversity of thought and perspective, and help make the scientific community more flexible and responsive in times of change. For a third year, the EDBT/ICDT program includes a D&I panel that follows up on past discussions by inviting recognised practitioners that have allowed our community to open borders and explore the meaning and perception of D&I in scientific contexts across different regions.

Last year’s panel addressed the key question: What does D&I mean in Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, the north and south of Africa, Asia, and Oceania? The two important conclusions were: first, there is a need to develop D&I curricula at all educational levels, and second, that data driven studies, where people consider decolonial criteria, gender balance, communities' identities, epistemic violence, and repair can open new perspectives to better promote D&I in conferences and in science.

Following up on the first conclusion of last year’s panel, the D&I panel in EDBT/ICDT 2023 focuses on curricula and educational programs. Currently, the D&I wave is in policies, actions and educational programs of many institutions with STEM programs. They include D&I and gender equity courses with different perspectives. The D&I panel in EDBT/ICDT 2023 gathers specialists and colleagues that are participating in similar educational activities in institutions of different geographic regions to discuss and contrast the kind of courses and content included.

Questions of interest:

• Who is the target audience, undergrads, grads, or both?
• What about professors and staff?
• How to connect D&I to daily activities?
• How to go from theory to practice?
• How have these initiatives been received by professors and students?

Panelists

Malihe Alikhani (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the School of Computing and Information at the University of Pittsburgh. Her primary research interests are in the fields of Natural Language Processing and Cognitive Science, with broader interests in Computational Social Sciences. She works towards designing inclusive and equitable language technologies. This involves developing systems that can communicate and collaborate with diverse populations, especially those from underserved communities, for critical applications such as education, health, and social justice. She studies how learning models might become biased, propose ways to mitigate such biases, and partner with educators, doctors, and community members to create inclusive technology-enabled experiences. Her work has received multiple best paper awards at ACL 2021, UAI2022, INLG2021, and UMAP2022 and has been supported by DARPA, NIH, Google, and Amazon.

Cecilia Paz Contreras Ramírez (she/her) is head of the Community Management and Violence Eradication Unit of the National Autonomous University of Mexico was at UCM to meet with members of the university community. Cecilia Paz Contreras Ramírez, a graduate of the Catholic University of Maule (UCM) from the School of Social Work, has a doctorate in Political and Social Sciences and currently works as head of the Unit for Community Management and Eradication of Violence at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

Arianna Montorsi (she/her) is professor of theoretical physics at Politecnico di Torino, Italy. Her research is focussed on statistical theory of quantum condensed matter systems and has led to a hundred publications in international journals and books. Since 2015 she has also become interested in gender policies and biases in research and research evaluation, and has been invited to present her work at various conferences. Since 2018 she is Rector's advisor for gender equality and diversity, and Rector's delegate in the Gender Committee of the National Conference of Rectors (CRUI). Since 2019 she is in the Board of the National Conference for Equal Opportunities Bodies in Universities, and in 2020 she became the coordinator of the Gender Observatory of Politecnico di Torino. Still in 2020, she has been co-author of the first Gender Report of Politecnico di Torino together with Alessandra Colombelli, Tania Cerquitelli and Claudia De Giorgi.

Mirella M. Moro (she/her) is an associate professor at the Computer Science department at UFMG (Belo Horizonte, Brazil). She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science (University of California Riverside - UCR, 2007), and MSc and BSc in Computer Science as well (UFRGS, Brazil, 2001, 1999). She is a member of the ACM SIGMOD, ACM SIGCSE, ACM-W, IEEE, IEEE WIE, SBC, and MentorNet. She was part of ACM Education Council (2011-2019), Education Director of SBC (Brazilian Computer Society, 2009-2015) and the editor-in-chief of the electronic magazine SBC Horizontes (2008-2012). Mirella has been working with research in Computer Science in the area of Databases since 1997. Her research interests include gender diversity, social networks, scientometrics, query optimization.

Moderators

Genoveva Vargas-Solar (she/her http://www.vargas-solar.com) is a principal scientist of the French Council of Scientific Research (CNRS) and a member of the DataBase group of Laboratory on Informatics on Image and Information Systems (LIRIS). She is a regular member of the Mexican Academia of Computing. She obtained her Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR - tenure) from University of Grenoble. She obtained her first PhD degree in Computer Science at University Joseph Fourier and her second PhD degree in Literature at University Stendhal. She obtained her first master’s degree in computer science at University Joseph Fourier and her second master’s degree in Comparative Literature at University Stendhal. She did her undergraduate studies on Computer Systems Engineering at Universidad de las Américas in Puebla. She contributes to the construction of service-based database/data science management systems. She promotes gender equality and diversity and inclusion (D&I) actions. She is a member of the gender equality committee at LIRIS and she represents EDBT in the inter-conference initiative D&I databases. She actively promotes scientific cooperation in Computer Science between Latin America and Europe, particularly between France and Mexico.

Liat Peterfreund (she/her) is a CNRS researcher at LIGM, Gustav Eiffel University. Her research focuses on the foundations of data management and she is currently working mainly on the formal semantics of graph query languages, and on new approaches for handling incomplete information. She completed her Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Benny Kimelfeld at the Technion, Israel, and her dissertation deals with the complexity and expressiveness of queries for information extraction -- relational queries on data that is extracted from text. She is involved in the D&I DB initiative as the representative of PODS and ICDT, and in various initiatives aimed to expose high-school students to research in academia.

Panos K. Chrysanthis (he/him) is a Professor of Computer Science and a founder and director of the Advanced Data Management Technologies Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also an adjunct Professor at Carnegie-Mellon University and at the University of Cyprus. His research interests lie within the areas of data management, analytics and visualization. In 1995, he was a recipient of the U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER Award for his investigation on the management of data for mobile and wireless computing. His editorial service includes VLDB J., IEEE TKDE and DAPD, and his recent conference service include PC Chair of IEEE ICDE (2018), IEEE MDM (2021) and ACM DEBS (2022). He is involved in the D&I DB initiative, serving as the lead of the MEDIA action, the D&I Chair for EDBT 2021-2023, MDM 2021-2022, and DEBS 2022. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Contributor. He was honored with seven teaching awards, in 2015, he received the University of Pittsburgh's Provost Award for Excellence in Mentoring (doctoral students) and in 2019 the Outstanding Alumni Achievement in Education Award, School of Information and Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.