Carrie Heitman and Heather Richards-Rissetto will team up to give the talk “Discriminatory Algorithms and Cultural Complexities” at 5:30 p.m. Feb. 25 in the Nebraska Union’s Swanson Auditorium. The lecture is free and open to the public.

The lecture continues the theme “The Rise of the Machines” for the CAS Inquire program, serving as a starting point for discussions students in the program have with peers, staff and faculty.

Heitman is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and associate director of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. Richards-Rissetto is an assistant professor in the department and a faculty fellow in the center. Both use algorithms in their research as part of their digital humanities projects: Heitman studies the Salmon Pueblo ruins, and Richards-Rissetto reconstructs ancient Mayan culture.

From social media feeds to facial recognition software, “there has been a growing awareness of the implicit and explicit biases embedded in the technologies we use,” the speakers wrote in their abstract.

The talk will explain what algorithms are, how they can be used by researchers and the risks involved in using them.

Learn more about the CAS Inquire program, including links to videos of previous presentations.