The PHAWM project and the SOCIAL AI CDT at University of Glasgow are excited to invite you to a special talk by Prof Margaret Burnett on Monday 22 September 2025 at 1.30pm in the ARC, University of Glasgow, and online, followed by a hospitality reception.
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Mission: To enable diverse mere mortals to assess an AI agent's "goodness".
As AI agents become more and more prevalent in everyday technology, more and more individuals -- from every walk of life, at every level of education, across the entire socioeconomic spectrum, of every gender, race, ethnicity and age -- will need to make decisions about which agent(s) to use, when and how, and to what extent using them is the best path forward. The "mission" this talk explores is how we can enable such diverse individuals to make such decisions in ways that make their lives better instead of worse. For example:
Should I use an agent to enable me to be a remote caregiver for my grandmother, or should I move in with her?
Should I buy semi-self-driving car X, or semi-self-driving car Y, or stay entirely manual?
Will using one of these systems cost someone's life? Will it so destroy someone's privacy that their lives become filled with fear and harassment?
Will my child become less intelligent over time if I give her access to LLM-powered "homework helpers"?
In this talk, I don't show how to answer any of these questions. But I show a few paths forward that may point to way(s) toward answering them, and at least one path on how not to answer them.
Margaret Burnett is a University Distinguished Professor at Oregon State University, with a research focus on diverse people who are using technology while engaged in some form of problem-solving. She co-leads the team that created GenderMag, a software inspection process that uncovers gender inclusiveness issues in software from spreadsheets to programming environments; just introduced an analytical approach to intersectional HCI; and is now introducing SocioeconomicMag for improving technology’s socioeconomic inclusiveness. She co-founded the area of end-user software engineering, which aims to improve software creation/customization for diverse computer users not trained in programming. Also, in collaboration with Simone Stumpf and others, she contributed unique, seminal work on explaining AI to ordinary computer users. Her recent paper bringing inclusive design perspectives to Human-AI interaction just won an ACM TiiS Best Paper of 2024 award. Burnett is an ACM Fellow, a member of the ACM CHI Academy, winner of the 2023 Grace Hopper Conference’s ABIE Tech Leader Award, and an award-winning mentor.