France

Donato Ricci is a designer and researcher. He specialises in the use of Design Methods in Human and Social Sciences. His latest research focuses on the search for accurate descriptions of the moments of tension between humans and computational technologies, to problematise and negotiate algorithmic agentivity, and understand the way we want to be computed individually and collectively.

He followed the design aspects of Bruno Latour’s AIME project with whom he co-curated the Reset Modernity! exhibition at ZKM Karlsruhe and the Shanghai Himalayas Museum. From 2005 to 2012 he was involved in developing the DensityDesign Lab’s research programs. He is Assistant Professor of “Representação e Conhecimento” (Knowledge and Representation) at the Universidade de Aveiro. He is part of the SPEAP Programme in Political Arts. 

His work has been featured in several conferences and exhibitions (Medialab Prado – Visualizar; SIGGRAPH Conference; MIT Humanities + Digital Conference, The Art of Network), publications and showcases (Data Flow; Information Graphics; Visual Complexity; Visual storytelling). He received a silver and a bronze at the Malofiej Awards and was selected, in 2018, for the ADI Design Index.

Pauline Gourlet works at the intersection of design research and STS, developing an action research approach that experiments with collective inquiries dispositifs.  Participatory practices of documentation and representation are thus at the heart of her research. 

She is interested in situated developments of digital technologies, focusing on their effects on collective actions and decision-making processes. As the post-doc of the Shaping AI project, she focused on the development of AI in France and led a 3-year effort to structure a public of co-inquirers to re-problematize AI from their situated practices. 

Thanks to the diverse sites of investigation she has engaged with over the years — from French elementary school to the United Nations — her analyses seek to politicize and pluralize the public problems related to digitalization and computation.

Pauline founded the designers’ collective L’Atelier de Chercheurs in 2013 and she obtained a PhD in ergonomics in 2018 at the University of Paris 8, in partnership with Ensadlab. She was a visiting teacher and researcher from 2017 to 2018 at The New School in NYC. Her recent work circulates in academic journals in design (Science du Design, Diseña) and STS (Big Data and Society), as well as in civil society settings (unions, NGOs, state agencies…).

Dominique Cardon is a professor of sociology at Sciences Po. He has been a researcher at the Usage Laboratory (SENSE) at Orange Labs and an associate professor at Université Paris Est/LATTS. 

His research focuses on the uses of the internet in different contexts: the governance of Wikipedia, the relationship between expressive practices and the social network on blogs, modesty and shamelessness online, the practices of online social networks, and so on. 

His work seeks to combine an analysis of transformations in public space with expressive and relational dynamics. Since 2010, his work has involved a sociological analysis of web algorithms and big data, intending to understand both the internal form of calculations and the world that calculators project onto our societies. 

Maxime Crépel is a sociologist and research engineer at the Sciences Po médialab. His research focuses on the uses of digital technology. He specialises in methodological approaches combining qualitative and digital methods, specifically network analysis and natural language processing.

He has participated in several study projects related to the use of social networks and user-generated content services, ebook and mobile phone uses, as well as issues related to digital identities, AI and algorithms.

Valentin Goujon is a PhD candidate in sociology at the médialab of Sciences Po. As part of the international and multidisciplinary Shaping AI research project, his work focuses on the rise of machine learning and deep learning methods in artificial intelligence research (natural language processing, computer vision, speech processing, robotics). He is the coordinator of the FlashLab seminar and of the working group “Digital Materialities” hosted by the Center for Internet and Society (CNRS). He is also a member of the editorial board of the RESET journal.

Axel Meunier is a PhD candidate in design at Goldsmiths College under the supervision of Alex Wilkie, Michael Guggenheim and Tommaso Venturini. His practice-based research is concerned with participatory design (PD) as a method of inquiry in the social sciences, and experiments with the participation of publics as co-investigators. At the intersection of design and Science and Technology Studies, his PhD focuses on the interplay between PD and the design of Artificial Intelligence and puts participation to the test of situational aspects of Machine Learning. It is based on a series of participatory workshops surfacing algorithm troubles conducted in collaboration with research institutions, educational institutions, associations, cultural spaces etc.

Axel Meunier studied at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and at Sciences Po’s Experimentation Program in Art and Politics. He has worked at CNRS and for companies, public institutions and in art contexts. At the médialab he has been involved in and published about controversy mapping, datasprinting, research-led teaching and inventive methods.

Béatrice joined médialab as a research engineer in September 2020. Previously, she completed a PhD at CentraleSupélec, in partnership with the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel and Sciences Po Paris. Her research focuses on the flow of information between social networks and traditional media, using natural language processing and data mining methods.

Maud Barret Bertelloni is a PhD candidate in philosophy of technology at the médialab and at COSTECH (UTC) under the supervision of Dominique Cardon and Xavier Guchet. Her research focuses on the politics of technology, working across philosophy of technology, political theory and STS. Within Shaping AI, she focused on policy, particularly the deployment of AI systems in French public administration. 

Héloïse is a PhD candidate in sociology at the médialab, under the supervision of Dominique Cardon and Laurence Dumoulin. Her work focuses on the impact of the use of algorithmic tools on the work of lawyers. 

Within Shaping AI, she contributed to some preliminary research. She also co-conducted interviews and participated in the workshops organized by the project.

Andrea Benedetti is a PhD Student in Design at the Politecnico di Milano, he’s affiliated with DensityDesign Lab where he started as Junior Research Assistant in 2019. He works at the intersection of data visualization, creative coding and communication design. He worked on interfaces for the curatorial and serendipitous exploration of digital archives of cultural heritage and is now focusing on the role of interfaces and the role of design in general in shaping awareness of how data is produced by users.

After obtaining her Italian Master’s degree in Legal Sciences for Innovation, with a thesis on new innovation methodologies implemented in Europe and a specific focus on Smart Cities and AI, Corinna sought ways to bring the communication and visual arts worlds closer to the public sphere and the new technologies issues. During her time at Médialab, she integrated the Shaping AI team to understand concretely how and where AI collaborates with humans (and vice versa). This research should be able to lay the foundations of the question ‘How do we delineate a better HUMAN-AI relationship in the actions between the two? And how do we increase the human presence in the decision-making process of an AI?

Charlie Crottier-Combe collaborated with the médialab between 2021 and 2022 in the context of his Master’s degree in Interactive Design at the École Supérieure de Design Villefontaine. He worked on the human role in the gathering, cleaning and organization of data in the creation of AI datasets, and specialized his research on how Interactive Design can help prevent biased AI models trained by undocumented data and guide the stakeholders of the world of AI to a better understanding and documentation of datasets. Today, he is finalizing his course at École 42 Lyon Auvergne Rhône-Alpes in the domain of computer science, and works on a personal research project around planned obsolescence and designing more robust products and interfaces.