Thoughtlines podcast | We are innovation & communication with Gina Neff

Description

Thoughtlines: academic thinking outside the box

Series 2 | Episode 2: We are innovation & communication with Gina Neff

In this episode we talk tech, power, and the endless hell of phone storage with sociologist Gina Neff. 

As the Executive Director of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at Cambridge, and the Professor of Technology and Society at Oxford, she briskly rejects the mythology of a ‘lone genius’ in Silicon Valley coding every aspect of our daily lives.  Instead, she champions those she calls the ‘unsung heroes’ of innovation – essentially everyone struggling to make a ‘better, faster, new way of working’ actually … work.

Her academic research spans industries as diverse as fashion, construction, and healthcare, and she’s equally at home online, winning a coveted Webby award for her beginner’s guide ‘The A to Z of AI’.

Her love of a good data story well told is anything but dry, and her pandemic project is still flourishing.  But her main goal is to empower us all to answer two key questions: what kind of future do we want? And what choices must we make today to make that happen?

• Presented by broadcast journalist Catherine Galloway and produced by Carl Homer of Cambridge TV
• Thoughtlines is available via most podcast platforms
• Listen to all episodes of Thoughtlines

Learn More:

• Follow Gina Neff on Twitter (for those daily flower photos and more!)
• Gina Neff is the Executive Director of The Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at CRASSH – all projects discussed in this episode can be found on the Centre’s website.
• Watch Gina Neff give the CRASSH annual lecture, on ‘The Cost of Data – making sense in digital society‘.
• Take a look at Gina Neff’s recently published book discussed in this episode: ‘Human-Centered Data Science’.
• Take a look at Gina Neff’s ‘A to Z of AI‘ project, discussed in this episode, and which won a Webby Award for Best Educational Website in 2021.

Other examples of Gina Neff’s work:

• On why AI must not make working women’s lives worse – OECD.AI
• A paper relating to her ongoing work on technology in commercial construction, ‘Innovation through practice: the messy work of making technology useful for architecture, engineering and construction teams‘
• Her work on data, and on work: Who does the work of data? and Venture Labour.