AI Ethics Bottom-Up: Formation of Ground Truth and Global AI Politics

Speaker: Ishtiaque Ahmed, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science

Date: Thursday, November 20, 2025

Time: 2:00 – 3:00 p.m.

Location: Hybrid 700 University Avenue, 9th floor, Toronto and online

Abstract:

Artificial intelligence systems rely on massive datasets to learn what is “true,” but the process of creating that truth is far from neutral. This talk reveals the hidden infrastructure of data annotation that underpins every supervised model: millions of human annotators, often working under precarious contracts across the Global South, who interpret ambiguous data into the labels that machines learn from. Each annotation encodes social, cultural, and linguistic assumptions that ultimately shape a model's behaviour, bias, and performance. By examining how annotators’ decisions and working conditions determine what counts as accurate or ethical data, I argue that AI ethics must move beyond abstract principles toward an understanding of the material and geopolitical systems that produce ground truth. From labelling hate speech to detecting misinformation, these processes expose how technical pipelines reproduce global hierarchies of labour, language, and legitimacy. Reframing annotation as a core computational process allows us to build AI that is not only robust and reliable but also socially accountable and globally aware.

Speaker Biography:

Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto and the founding director of the ‘Third Space' research group. His research interests lie at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Ahmed received his PhD and Master’s from Cornell University in the USA, and his Bachelor's and Master’s from BUET in Bangladesh. Over the last 15 years, he has studied and developed successful computing technologies with various marginalized communities in Bangladesh, India, Canada, the USA, Pakistan, Iraq, Turkey, and Ecuador.

He has published over 100 peer-reviewed research articles and received multiple best paper awards in top computer science venues, including CHI, CSCW, ICTD, and FaccT. Ahmed has received numerous honours and accolades, including the International Fulbright Science and Technology Fellowship, the Intel Science and Technology Fellowship, the Fulbright Centennial Fellowship, the Schwartz Reisman Fellowship, the Massey Fellowship, the Connaught Scholarship, the Microsoft AI & Society Fellowship, the Google Inclusion Research Award, and the Facebook Faculty Research Award.  His research has also received generous funding support from all three branches of Canadian tri-council research (NSERC, CIHR, SSHRC), the USA’s NSF and NIH, and the Bangladesh government’s ICT Ministry. Ahmed was named a “Future Leader” by the Computing Research Association in 2024.