Dr. Theodora Dryer is a writer, historian, and critical policy analyst. Her work centers on histories of data and technology in the climate crisis and the political functions of algorithms and digital data systems in water and natural resource management. She is Director of the Water Justice and Technology Project (www.waterjustice-tech.org) and teaches topics on digital technology and environmental justice at New York University. Dr. Dryer holds awards from the Charles Babbage Institute in Information Technology and the IEEE in History of Electrical and Computing Technology. Her work has appeared in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Osiris, and elsewhere.

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Just Climate Futures

Dr. Sara Beery is the Homer A. Burnell Career Development Professor in the MIT Faculty of Artificial Intelligence and Decision-Making. She was previously a visiting researcher at Google, working on large-scale urban forest monitoring as part of the Auto Arborist project. She received her PhD in Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Caltech in 2022, where she was advised by Pietro Perona and awarded the Amori Doctoral Prize for her thesis. Her research focuses on building computer vision methods that enable global-scale environmental and biodiversity monitoring across data modalities, tackling real-world challenges including geospatial and temporal domain shift, learning from imperfect data, fine-grained categories, and long-tailed distributions. She partners with industry, nongovernmental organizations, and government agencies to deploy her methods in the wild worldwide. She works toward increasing the diversity and accessibility of academic research in artificial intelligence through interdisciplinary capacity building and education, and has founded the AI for Conservation slack community, serves as the Biodiversity Community Lead for Climate Change AI, and founded and directs the Summer Workshop on Computer Vision Methods for Ecology.

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Tawanna Dillahunt is a 2023-2024 MIT MLK Fellow in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information. She leads the Social Innovations Group (SIG), an interdisciplinary group of individuals whose vision is to design, build, and enhance technologies to solve real-world problems affecting marginalized groups and individuals, primarily in the U.S. Her current projects aim to address unemployment, environmental sustainability, and technical literacy by fostering social and socio-technical capital within these communities. Tawanna is a 2022-2023 William Bentinck-Smith Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and an ACM Distinguished Member.

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Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning
MIT

Catherine D’Ignazio is a scholar, artist/designer and hacker mama who focuses on feminist technology, data literacy and civic engagement. D’Ignazio is an Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. She is also Director of the Data + Feminism Lab. D'Ignazio's book, Data Feminism (MIT Press 2020), co-authored with Lauren F. Klein, charts a course for more ethical and empowering data science practices. Her forthcoming book, Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action (MIT Press 2024), highlights how mainstream data science can learn a lot from the care and memory work of grassroots feminist activists across the Americas.

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Moderator
Just Climate Futures