What's the Trajectory?

Event details

This paper will discuss both societal and organisational issues around the cases of Harlem Suarez (Almlak Alaswd) and Mohamed Osman Mohamud. In what started as short case studies into a the issues surrounding the vectorisation of human attributes and the use of vectorised attributes in classification problems, raises a number of significant wider issues.

The two cases share some common features of what could provocatively described as FBI radicalisation programs, but are at least demonstrations of the significant problems of classification and intervention by algorithmic processes. The paper will introduce the context of the cases as algorithmic classification problems, and the use of algorithmic classification to predict intention or future behaviour (both explicitly or implicitly), it will also describe the cases themselves, and finally raise some discussion points that will be explored as the research progresses.