Pulitzer Center Champions' Exclusive Event: Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson on AI Accountability

Join the Pulitzer Center on February 23, 2023, at 1:00pm EST for a conversation with Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson, a freelance journalist and a special adviser to the Pulitzer Center's AI Accountability Network. Pulitzer Center Executive Editor Marina Walker Guevara will moderate the discussion and a Q&A with audience questions from the Zoom chat.

At a time when ChatGPT and other AI tools are creating equal amounts of excitement and dread, this conversation will focus on the role journalists play reporting on and raising awareness about algorithms that touch on everything, from medicine to social welfare and the criminal justice system. 

This event is exclusive to Pulitzer Center Champion donors, and registration is required. If you are already a donor, please register now!

Anyone who makes a donation of any size to the Pulitzer Center is a Champion. Learn more on how to become a Champion and join our team for events like this throughout the year.

Cavanaugh Simpson is a lecturer in the Master's in Science Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University, and a former staff writer at the Miami Herald and Johns Hopkins Magazine. Throughout her career, Cavanaugh Simpson has written from the U.S. and abroad, in China, India, Argentina, Cuba, and elsewhere.

Cavanaugh Simpson's Pulitzer Center project, State of Surveillance, has fostered social justice impacts on police technology use in communities of color, with recent work cited in a U.S. appeals court decision that found persistent aerial surveillance unconstitutional, grounding the "Spy Planes" over Baltimore.

Her Baltimore reporting sparked media interviews on AI in policing, including for ABC News' "The Longest Shadow": 9/11 leads to the militarization of US police departments. Her South Florida SunSentinel series on racial biases in police facial recognition use on Black protesters and local residents prompted area police agencies to adopt policies regulating or banning indiscriminate use of facial recognition tools. Her work has also been cited in numerous academic reports.