UG honorary doctorate for Kate Crawford

On Friday 24 May 2024 at 3 p.m., the University of Groningen (UG) will award four honorary doctorates in the Academy Building. The recipients of the honorary doctorates are meteorologist Gerrit Hiemstra, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus, Prof. Mariana Mazzucato, and artificial intelligence researcher Dr Kate Crawford.

The awarding of honorary doctorates is part of the UG´s 410th anniversary celebrations, which will include all kinds of activities from 21 till 25 May. The honorary doctorates were selected on the basis of four important UG themes: energy, digitization, sustainability, and public health.

Kate Crawford

Dr Kate Crawford will receive an honorary doctorate because of her exceptional work as an academic in the field of social change and media technology, specifically in the field of artificial intelligence and its impact.

Kate Crawford is an internationally leading expert on the social and environmental impacts of artificial intelligence. She is a Research Professor at USC Annenberg in Los Angeles, a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research in New York, an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney, and the inaugural Visiting Chair of AI and Justice at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. She has devoted the past 20 years to understanding how AI and large-scale data systems are impacting our society. Her research has greatly influenced current and future policy for AI in both social and environment domains, and her work has shaped the field of responsible AI. 

Her book Atlas of AI won multiple awards including the Sally Hacker Prize from the Society for the History of Technology, and the ASSI&T Best Information Book Award, and was named book of the year by Science and the Financial Times. The book has now been translated into 12 languages. Her writing and thought leadership are informing policymakers around the world and is changing the direction of this technology for the better. Dr. Crawford has advised policymakers in the United Nations, the European Parliament, the Federal Trade Commission in the US and the White House on AI technology and was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in AI for 2023.

Dr. Crawford has also founded multiple research centers and groups around the world, including co-founding one of the first institutes dedicated to studying the social impacts of AI, which was based at NYU. She also co-founded the FATE group at Microsoft Research, for Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Ethics in AI.  One of Dr. Crawford’s many innovative projects is “Knowing Machines,” an international research group that investigates the history and politics of how we train AI systems. Leading a team of computer scientists, humanists, journalists, legal experts and artists, Crawford creates radically interdisciplinary projects that can see AI from many angles.  By interrogating the sources of “ground truth” that is being created from datasets, Dr. Crawford is helping to root out harms like bias and discrimination from AI.  

In addition to her research, Crawford also makes large-scale artworks and visual investigations. Her  “Anatomy of an AI System”  with Vladan Joler is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the V&A Museum in London and won the Design of the Year award in 2019. Her collaboration with the artist Trevor Paglen, Excavating AI, won the Ayrton Prize from the British Society for the History of Science. Her latest exhibition, Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power 1500-2025, opened in Milan, November 2023 and then toured to the KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin. It is slated for further exhibitions in Paris, Barcelona, Linz, and Copenhagen over the next two years. 

Dr Crawford’s work has influenced the creation of new fields of research, from responsible AI to critical AI studies, and her work in the arts has also been widely recognized as changing the public’s understanding of the impacts of AI in everyday life.

Read here the full articel with all four all four honory doctorates.