Thursday, April 2, 2026
2:00 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.
KMDI
Robarts Library, Room RL7020, 130 St George St, Toronto, ON M5S 3H1, Canada
Abstract
Platforms such as Wikipedia, speech recognition systems, and news media are often treated as neutral infrastructures. In practice, they shape how information is represented and whose voices become visible.
This talk explores how representational imbalances emerge within large information systems. Drawing on computational analyses of Wikipedia, speech recognition technologies, and news reporting on police incidents, Farhan Samir examines how dominant perspectives are reproduced while others remain underrepresented. By making these patterns visible, the research opens space for rethinking how information systems might support more plural and representative forms of knowledge.
Bio
Farhan Samir is an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Computer Science Department at the University of Toronto, advised by Professor Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed. He completed his PhD at the University of British Columbia, where his research combined computational methods with questions about knowledge representation and information systems.
His work has been recognized with an EMNLP Outstanding Paper Award, an NSERC Doctoral Fellowship, a UBC Public Scholars Initiative Award, and the 2024–25 UBC Department of Statistics Award in Data Science. He has previously conducted research with NVIDIA, Amazon Science, and the Allen Institute for AI.
Event organized in collaboration with the Critical Computing Group at U of T.
