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Data x Direction's Makati Attends ACM FAccT 2025
Tlamelo Makati reports from ACM FAccT 2025 in Athens, exploring ethical design, participatory research, and what it means to shape AI with care.
Tlamelo Makati reports from Athens, exploring ethical design, participatory research, and what it means to shape AI with care.
The ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT 2025), held June 23–26 in Athens, Greece, convened thought leaders across computing, law, social sciences, and philosophy to probe the governance of algorithmic systems. Keynote addresses were delivered by Suresh Venkatasubramanian (Brown University), Nathalie Smuha (KU Leuven), Kristian Lum (DeepMind), and Molly Crockett (Princeton).
The conference — comprising over 200 peer-reviewed papers, workshops, and tutorials — rigorously interrogated topics from biased healthcare algorithms to opaque recommendation systems and surveillance technologies.
Data x Direction member Tlamelo Makati (Technological University, Dublin) offers an intimate, on-the-ground perspective in her reflection piece, emphasizing how participatory design and ethical framing can guide AI toward fairness and inclusion.
FAccT reinforced something I’ve been struggling with for a while: ethical AI is not just about making systems “less biased” or “more fair.” It’s about who gets to participate in shaping those systems.
It’s about the structures that silence, exclude, or diminish certain voices. And it’s about design, not just of technology, but of process, collaboration, and imagination.
— Tlamelo Makati
Congratulations to Makati for attending the event and participating in the Doctoral Consortium where she was able to discuss her research on developing a framework for inclusive AI.
Read the full post on Data x Direction’s Substack: Algorithms and Access: Reflections on FAccT 2025 and Inclusive AI
See also: Tlamelo Makati on LinkedIn
More information on ACM FAccT 2025
Algorithmic systems are being adopted in a growing number of contexts, fueled by big data. These systems filter, sort, score, recommend, personalize, and otherwise shape human experience, increasingly making or informing decisions with major impact on access to, e.g., credit, insurance, healthcare, parole, social security, and immigration. Although these systems may bring myriad benefits, they also contain inherent risks, such as codifying and entrenching biases; reducing accountability, and hindering due process; they also increase the information asymmetry between individuals whose data feed into these systems and big players capable of inferring potentially relevant information.
ACM FAccT is an interdisciplinary conference dedicated to bringing together a diverse community of scholars from computer science, law, social sciences, and humanities to investigate and tackle issues in this emerging area. Research challenges are not limited to technological solutions regarding potential bias, but include the question of whether decisions should be outsourced to data- and code-driven computing systems. We particularly seek to evaluate technical solutions with respect to existing problems, reflecting upon their benefits and risks; to address pivotal questions about economic incentive structures, perverse implications, distribution of power, and redistribution of welfare; and to ground research on fairness, accountability, and transparency in existing legal requirements.