Keynote Speaker: Sarah T. Roberts

Sarah T. Roberts will be the keynote speaker on Wednesday, March 14th. Roberts is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Studies (Graduate School of Education & Information Studies) at UCLA. She holds a Ph.D. from the iSchool at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to joining UCLA in 2016, she was an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University in London, Ontario. On the internet since 1993, she was previously an information technology professional for 15 years, and, as such, her research interests focus on information work and workers. Professor Roberts is internationally recognized as a leading scholar on the emerging topic of commercial content moderation or CCM, a term she coined to define the field study around the large-scale, industrial and for-pay practice of social media user-generated content adjudication. Roberts is frequently consulted by the press and others on issues related to social media, society and culture. She has been interviewed on these topics in print, on radio and on television worldwide including: The New York Times, Associated Press, Le Monde, The Economist, the BBC, the CBC, The Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, Wired, The Washington Post, News Corp Australia, Asahi Shimbun (Japan), and CNN, among others. Dr. Roberts was recently elected to the board of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. In December of 2017 she is hosting All Things in Moderation on the UCLA campus, a first-of-its-kind conference to bring researchers, civil society advocates, workers, journalists and industry representatives together to discuss issues pertaining to social media moderation. Her book on commercial content moderation, entitled Behind the Screen: Digitally Laboring in Social Media’s Shadow World, is under contract with Yale University Press. See 2018 Keynotes page for full vide