Maria De-Arteaga

DHS Gives Local Cops a Facial Recognition App To Find Immigrants The app, called Mobile Identify and available on the Google Play Store, is specifically for local and regional law enforcement agencies working with ICE on immigration enforcement.

We've found DHS is giving local cops a new facial recognition app to find immigrants. Point camera at face, tells the cop to detain person or not. The app is available on Google's Play Store. Google took down apps that report ICE sightings but now hosts this app

www.404media.co/cbp-quietly-...

We’re excited to release the Call for Papers for #FAccT2026 which will be held in Montreal, Canada in June 2026! Abstracts are due on January 8th, papers due on January 13th.

Call for Papers: facctconference.org/2026/cfp

Important info in thread →

aaand we are officially in the hide-your-neighbors stage

Heading to AIES in a few weeks, looking forward to catching up with familiar faces and meeting new ones!

Congratulations, @jolukito.bsky.social 🥳 and congratulations, DDC!

Big personal news: my family and I decided to leave the US and we are starting a new chapter in Europe. I am looking forward to building a new home in Barcelona, where I will join ESADE as a tenured Associate Professor this Fall.

What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? I’m going to give a sideways answer to this, which is that the venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype. You can go back to the Netscape IPO, and that was the proof point that made venture capital the financial lifeblood of the tech industry. Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations. So you see this repetitive and exhausting hype cycle as a feature in this industry. A couple of years ago, you would have been asking me about the metaverse, then last year, you would have asked me about Web3 and crypto, and for each of these inflection points there’s an Andreessen Horowitz manifesto. It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology, without these tools and services and worlds ever actually manifesting. That’s key to understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world.

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

“Since AFP was founded in 1944, we have lost journalists in conflicts, some have been injured, others taken prisoner. But none of us remember witnessing colleagues die of hunger".
🚨🧵

Photo of the Town Hall meeting at last week's conference. The audience watches as Su Lin Blodgett announces the location of next year's conference. Su Lin Blodgett and Zeerak Talat will be General Chairs, and Michael Madaio will be PC Chair.

We're happy to officially announce the location of #FAccT2026!

Next year's conference will be held in Montreal, Canada 🇨🇦

Su Lin Blodgett and Zeerak Talat will be General Chairs, and Michael Madaio will be PC Chair 🎉

(thanks to MindView for the photo!)

Thank you, Jenn 💛 And thank you for all the work you did to put together such a stellar program!

Thank you, Sorelle! I wish our terms had overlapped more 💛 And I'm definitely not going anywhere. I just need a multi-year break from any service before I'm insane enough to put together a bid for FAccT Colombia 😊

I vividly remember attending the first FAccT and thinking it would be a *dream* to publish in it, so having served as EC has truly been an immense honor ❤️

After these five years, I am exhausted, but I am also very grateful to a community that has shaped my scholarship and my career in crucial ways, and I am very glad the time I have devoted to service has gone to a community doing such important work.

As a community, we are a bunch of people who deeply care, who are trying hard in all of our imperfect ways, and who have found others to build a counterweight to powerful entities who are harming communities in multitude of ways.

All this said, FAccT is awesome, I can’t think of any other space where many of the crucial conversations I see at FAccT would take place, and I hope folks in Athens are currently partying together, feeling in community, and charging up for all the fights we have ahead.

Over the years, I have seen countless people who drift away from the community after they finish their term serving, and I get it—I do feel the need to go into a hole and recharge before I can give more to this community.

3. This last one feels a bit odd to bring up, it feels a bit self-serving, but I suspect that's why none of us ever talk about it, so I'll say it regardless. FAccT as a community has many wonderful things, but I’d argue that it is very ungrateful to the people who do service for it.

Ensuring our mode of conversations and engagement is directed towards community building and strengthening is so crucial at a time when many in power will be rooting against us.

2. Intentionality in community building: This is an issue faced by most coalitions that seek transformative change—we are so trained to be critical, it is very easy to tear ourselves down. This is also another space where our research can inform our practice.

While counterfactuals are hard to estimate, I’d argue that the transition from twitter-mediated to bluesky-mediated conversations has had a palpable effect. Intentionality and agency in shaping our online spaces is a realm where our research touches our own community organizing.

1. Algorithmic-mediated conversations: As a community who is critical of algorithms, we ought to reflect on how algorithmic rewards have deeply shaped discourse and relationships in our community.

After 5 years of FAccT service, I see so much value in FAccT. Precisely for this reason, I want to take a moment to highlight elements that I believe the community needs to learn to better navigate, especially during a time when it is likely to face a hostile environment.

The end of #FAccT2025 marks the end of my 3-year term as FAccT EC, which followed a 2-year term as DEI Chair. It has been an honor to serve this community and watch it mature.

What a fantastic conference #FAccT2025! Very grateful to @metaxa.net @asiabiega.bsky.social and @sciorestis.bsky.social for their stellar job as GCs, and @jennwv.bsky.social @shakirm.bsky.social Sina Fazelpour and Talia Gillis for putting together a great program as PCs!

You can also read the paper here: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

These discrepancies raise important ethical concerns, particularly in high-stakes domains like healthcare. We offer recommendations for evaluation, reporting, and design of AI systems under label indeterminacy. Say hi to Jakob 👋 if you are in Athens and want to chat more about this!

In a case study on predicting neurological recovery in comatose patients, we show that different approaches to dealing with label indeterminacy can lead to models that (i) perform similarly on instances with known labels but (ii) issue very different predictions for instances with unknown labels.

We introduce the concept of label indeterminacy which arises in scenarios where labels are fundamentally unknowable for some instances, with no principled way to resolve ambiguity in the process of estimating them.

screenshot of title and authors (Jakob Schoeffer, Maria De-Arteaga, Jonathan Elmer)

Having a lot of FOMO not being able to be in person at #FAccT2025 but enjoying the virtual transmission 💻. Tomorrow Jakob will be presenting our paper "Perils of Label Indeterminacy: A Case Study on Prediction of Neurological Recovery After Cardiac Arrest".

Looking for posts about #FAccT2025? Check out our 🦋 custom feed 🦋 which is already lively and full of papers, events, and attendees for this year's conference in Athens!

Click the pin 📌 in the upper right hand corner to keep this feed quickly accessible.

bsky.app/profile/mari...