Conference Keynotes

Voice-based systems are increasingly integrated into our everyday lives, offering the promise of convenience, accessibility, and even companionship. Yet these technologies are far from neutral. They are designed within sociotechnical systems that reflect dominant norms around language, identity, ability, and power. Questions like who gets to be understood, who is centered, and whose ways of speaking are supported are not merely technical; they are deeply political. To design with justice in mind, we must move beyond assumptions of neutrality. This means valuing lived experience as expertise, embracing participatory methods, and creating space for culturally grounded, relational forms of interaction. Building on my research, I examine how voice-based systems often fail to account for the needs and experiences of individuals who have been historically excluded from technology development. By reimagining voice-based interactions as relational and context-sensitive, I offer a vision for systems that reflect and respond to the diverse ways people live, speak, and care.

Maurita T. Harris, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at the Wilfrid Laurier University, holding appointments in User Experience Design and Social Justice & Community Engagement. She earned her B.A. from North Carolina State University in Psychology, and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Community Health from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research explores the way technology can support the well-being of people as they age from a Human Factors perspective focusing on design for aging; digital health; health and racial equity; and the technology lifecycle. As the director of the Well-Tech Research & Design Laboratory , she leads a team who collaborates with researchers to ensure the integration of interdisciplinary approaches and thinking from diverse fields (e.g., community health, design, engineering, gerontology, leisure, psychology, and social justice).

Agentics, complex ensembles of different machine learning, data processing, and generative AI models, can provide new autonomous and proactive decision-making capabilities to organizations, participate in complex workflows, and, when needed, seek guidance from and provide insights to human users in natural languages. But creating agentic AI systems means considering a broader scope than we have typically employed in designing human-AI interactions. My starting point is broad agreement that power relations, social structures, and social norms influence how human teams work and develop knowledge together, and that understanding these influences and incorporating explicit knowledge of them into agentic AI will result in systems more able to interoperate within diverse socio-cultural contexts and organizations. Among other things, this requires explicit attention to the social context within which our AI relations are performed and the incorporation of social knowledge into the design and operation of agentic AI systems. In this talk, I will review some potential starting points for this socio-technical work and emphasize the need for agentic systems capable of navigating the dynamic and emergent nature of the social world.

Matt Ratto is Associate Dean, Research and a full Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Dr. Ratto is also a faculty affiliate with the Climate Positive Energy Institute (CPE), the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society (SRI) and an SDG Fellow with the Sustainable Development Goals Institute (SDGs@UofT). He was awarded the Ontario Minister of College and Universities’ Award of Excellence in 2020, and has received two Canada Grand Challenge grants, Stars in Global health and Transition to Scale for his work on 3D printed prosthetics. His research explores the social production of knowledge in the context of emerging digital technologies and leverages critical theories and perspectives from the humanities and social sciences to develop novel insights and design paradigms. He is most known for his conceptual work on 'critical making' and its application in the creation of novel socio-technical systems.