Justice Working Group Talk: Dark Inquiry, creators of Bail Bloc

Spring Justice Working Group Series: Mark Hansen and Michael Krisch, Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University

Date: Thursday, March 22nd, 2018

Time: 4-6pm

Location: Jerome Greene Annex (see directions below)

Please join us for our second talk in the Spring Justice Working Group series, featuring Dark Inquiry, the creators of Bail Bloc (www.bailbloc.thenewinquiry.com). Bail Bloc is more than a distributed currency mining app that raises money to post bail, it’s an example of what Dark Inquiry calls “Rhetorical Software”; software designed to make arguments through interaction and shift public opinion in doing so. Prior to Bail Bloc, Dark Inquiry created the White Collar Crime Risk Zone app, (www.whitecollarcrime.thenewinquiry.com) as a critique of racist practices in the creation of A.I. and predictive policing. Dark Inquiry is a collective of artists, journalists, theorists, and technologists, rooted in the political commitments of its sister-satellite organization The New Inquiry Magazine (TNI). 

Join Dark Inquiry to discuss the importance of software development in addressing the injustices of mass incarceration and contemporary criminal justice. 

JB Rubinovitz is a machine learning and AI researcher/developer living in Brooklyn, NY where they are CTO of a startup that uses AI to enable asynchronous talk therapy over voice interfaces, called The Difference which is a Solve Challenge finalist in the Brain Health Category at MIT. At MIT, Rubinovitz I worked before doing research on the manifestation of personality in AI, specifically voice and text-based chat interfaces. They are the co-creator of Bail Bloc, software that mines cryptocurrency to pay for cash bail. Most recently Rubinovitz joined the Google AI Residency Program based out of Google AI New York. Rubinovitz was a hackNY fellow 2012, mentor 2013 and senior mentor 2014. They are a co-organizer for Identity Hackers and vrsalon.org. They helped start a 50,000 person hackathon hackers group on Facebook and have advised Major League Hacking and the Columbia Startup Lab.They have a M.S. in Computer Science with a Machine Learning concentration at Columbia. Before that they got a B.S. in Computer Science from Rutgers University.

Maddy Varner is a contributing researcher at ProPublica, focusing on technology’s impact on society. She is a founding member of the cyberfeminist security collective Deep Lab, and a former fellow at the Free Art and Technology Lab.

Rachel Rosenfelt is the Founding Editor of The New Inquiry, as well as co-founder of the Dark Inquiry collective. She was recently named Publisher and Vice President of The New Republic. In addition, Rosenfelt is a founding faculty member of the New School for Social Research’s Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism Master’s Program, where she serves as Associate Director and chair of the program’s board.   

The Jerome Greene Annex is located at 410 West 117th Street. To find the Annex, walk past Jerome Greene Hall (Columbia Law School) on 116^th Street headed toward Morningside Drive, make a left into the gated courtyard. Then, within the courtyard, walk past Wien Hall on your right, making a right turn just past the building, and enter the door on your right to get into the Annex.