Speaker: Stefano Canali
December 12, 2025 | 2:30 pm
Politecnico di Milano 25.1.2 Room (Bld. 5)
Via U.B. Secondo, 3
Contact: Prof. Francesco Pierri
Abstract
On December 12, 2025, at 2:30 pm the seminar on "Datafication, Classification, and the Non-Neutrality of Big Data and AI" will take place in Politecnico di Milano 25.1.2 Room (Building 5, Emilio Massa).Big data and artificial intelligence are clearly and increasingly everywhere and the tools of web and data science have moved from their original disciplinary backgrounds into more and more domains and increasingly in the hands of the public. In this lecture I will take a step back and look at the processes that have led to this raise in the the volume, velocity, and variety of data, introducing the concept of datafication as a way of making sense of the fact that these processes are not simply technological, but also social and political. On this basis I will discuss the grounding of artificial intelligence systems on datafication and present a framing of these systems as classification machines that make up worlds as much as they analyse them. These should lead us against seeing big data and artificial intelligence systems as neutral technologies and point to their political status and embedding as socio-technical systems.
The event can be also be followed online on Webex.