UPDATE: LSSI ONLINE Lunch Seminar Wednesday 18th June 2025 12.00-13.00CET with Alicja Ostrowska
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Graham Minenor-Matheson
Jun 4, 2025, 8:28:16 AMJun 4
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UPDATE: Sorry, forgot to mention the time. Seminar will be 12.00-13.00CET
Hi all!
We would once again like to invite you to another instalment of the LSSI Space Lunch Seminars on Wed 18th June 12.00-13.00CET with Alicja Ostrowska, Doctoral candidate in STS at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden who will talk about her work on Life and AI at NASA. Details and Zoom link below:
Title:
Life and AI at NASA: An Ethnography of How Scientists and Engineers Make Tools to Explore Other Worlds
Abstract:
The quest of astrobiology at NASA is to ask the fundamental questions about the nature of life: What is life? What are the origins of life in the universe? Despite the absence of signs of life in outer space, NASA has maintained support for their missions and research in astrobiology. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, I show how NASA and its practitioners shape the rightness of the research subject and their tools, to maintain legitimacy for their activities. I contribute to previous studies on struggles for legitimacy in astrobiology at NASA (Dick, 1996; Reinecke and Bimm, 2022) by illuminating the discrepancies between how NASA as an organization and its practitioners articulate the research subject and their tools.
In particular, I discuss production of AI tools to search for life in outer space. Drawing upon STS and sociology of ignorance, I analyze AI for life detection in terms of production of knowledge as well as ignorance about particular places on our own planet. AI is trained on massive amounts of data. Shifting the gaze to the planetary scale turns the attention away from how the data is produced in local places on Earth. In this presentation, I show how production of AI to search for life in outer space maintains, reproduces and disrupts bias about our own planet.
Zoom link: https://liu-se.zoom.us/j/65719295505?pwd=NdE45uztly4eWTFOxbUMH0XrwEF0w6.1
Everyone welcome!
Graham and Michael
Hi all!
We would once again like to invite you to another instalment of the LSSI Space Lunch Seminars on Wed 18th June 12.00-13.00CET with Alicja Ostrowska, Doctoral candidate in STS at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden who will talk about her work on Life and AI at NASA. Details and Zoom link below:
Title:
Life and AI at NASA: An Ethnography of How Scientists and Engineers Make Tools to Explore Other Worlds
Abstract:
The quest of astrobiology at NASA is to ask the fundamental questions about the nature of life: What is life? What are the origins of life in the universe? Despite the absence of signs of life in outer space, NASA has maintained support for their missions and research in astrobiology. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, I show how NASA and its practitioners shape the rightness of the research subject and their tools, to maintain legitimacy for their activities. I contribute to previous studies on struggles for legitimacy in astrobiology at NASA (Dick, 1996; Reinecke and Bimm, 2022) by illuminating the discrepancies between how NASA as an organization and its practitioners articulate the research subject and their tools.
In particular, I discuss production of AI tools to search for life in outer space. Drawing upon STS and sociology of ignorance, I analyze AI for life detection in terms of production of knowledge as well as ignorance about particular places on our own planet. AI is trained on massive amounts of data. Shifting the gaze to the planetary scale turns the attention away from how the data is produced in local places on Earth. In this presentation, I show how production of AI to search for life in outer space maintains, reproduces and disrupts bias about our own planet.
Zoom link: https://liu-se.zoom.us/j/65719295505?pwd=NdE45uztly4eWTFOxbUMH0XrwEF0w6.1
Everyone welcome!
Graham and Michael
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