Maryam Majedi of UCSB - Computer Science / Digital Ethics

Abstract:  With the increasing anti-LGBTQIA+ violence in the online environment, diversity and inclusion are among the most critical factors that must be considered in designing social media platforms. However, systematic implementation of inclusion across these platforms is a highly understudied subject. In this work, we analyze a corpus of psychology and computer science literature to identify different dimensions of LGBTQIA+ inclusion. We introduce a taxonomy that includes three orthogonal dimensions based on the inclusion affecting relationships of the entities within a social media ecosystem. We then construct an inclusion map where we define the borders of disjoint regions in the continuous inclusion space. We apply our taxonomy to 14 popular platforms and visualize where each of the 14 studied platforms lands on this map. Our findings show that a considerably small ratio of the studied popular platforms are completely inclusive. Most of these platforms significantly lack implementation measures for at least one of the three identified inclusion dimensions. LGBTQIA+ community members can use this taxonomy to make informed decisions when choosing platforms. Our taxonomy also highlights areas that require improvement for each platform.

Biography:

Dr. Maryam Majedi joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, as an Assistant Teaching Professor in 2023. She completed a teaching stream postdoc at the University of Toronto, where she worked with the Embedded Ethics Education Initiative (E3I) team and introduced the first ethics modules for CS courses in Canada. Dr. Majedi earned her Ph.D. in data privacy at the University of Calgary. Her Ph.D. work presents a novel privacy policy modeling technique. Prior to her Ph.D., she earned a Master of Science degree in High- Performance Scientific Computing from the University of New Brunswick. Dr. Majedi also completed a fellowship in Medical Innovation at Western University.  

Research:  Dr. Majedi's research primarily revolves around Embedded Ethics and Data Privacy. She explores the intersection of computer science and ethical considerations, aiming to develop modules that facilitate the integration of ethics and data privacy principles into computer science education.  

Address:United States