Events
Past Event
Corrina Schlombs - "Data Entry, Labor, and Gender: Office Automation in Capitalist and Socialist Economies"
Science in Human Culture Program - Klopsteg Lecture Series
4:30 PM
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Hagstrum 201, University Hall
Details
Speaker
Corrina Schlombs, History, Rochester Institute of Technology
Title
"Data Entry, Labor, and Gender: Office Automation in Capitalist and Socialist Economies"
Abstract
In 1949, MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener warned US labor leader Walther Reuther that, in the US capitalist economy, automation technologies would cause massive unemployment. But a closer look at labor changes from computing technologies reveals a more complex picture: electronic computing also required new manual routine labor for data entry. Data occurred on paper, such as checks, insurance contracts or phone notes, and before it could be processed by a computer, it needed to be transferred into a computer-legible format—often punch cards or tape. In my talk, I examine mid-twentieth century office automation in capitalist and socialist economies, with a focus on the East German financial sector. In an economy promising full employment and lacking sufficient numbers of workers, officials promoted automation technologies with the goal of releasing workers. However, computing technologies were implemented in ways that heavily drew on women’s labor for data entry. Investigating how questions of technological change, employment, labor, and identity played out in different economic contexts, the talk calls technological promises into question at a time when artificial intelligence technologies are (again) expected to uproot the balance between human and machine labor.
Biography
Dr. Schlombs’s research focuses on technology and capitalism in transatlantic relations. In her current book project, she investigates transatlantic transfers of productivity culture and technology in the two decades before and after World War II. Productivity, a statistical measure of output per worker, came to encapsulate the American economic system, and transatlantic debates about productivity called into question the notion of the capitalist West during the Cold War conflict.
Time
Monday, November 18, 2024 at 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM
Location
Hagstrum 201, University Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Science in Human Culture Program - Klopsteg Lecture Series
"Fun with Fashion" - Larry Davis
Northwestern Network for Collaborative Intelligence (NNCI)
12:00 PM
Details
Join us for an in-person Distinguished Speaker event featuring Larry Davis, a leading figure in computer vision and artificial intelligence whose influential academic career and recent industry innovations at Amazon have helped shape modern approaches to visual understanding and generative media.
Title: "Fun with Fashion"
Abstract: More than 100,000,000 customers shop for clothing online at Amazon annually in the United States alone. The fashion catalogue is enormous and changes with high velocity as new styles are introduced and older items either go out of fashion or out of stock. Customers are challenged to find clothing that fits their style and their bodies at a price that fits their budgets. The Amazon Fashion science team addresses these challenges through the design and development of new machine learning and computer vision models that help customers navigate the catalog and efficiently evaluate items Amazon is recommending to them. The talk will discuss solutions the team has developed to problems including virtual try on (what will this garment look like on me?), complementary recommendations (how do I style this garment?) and size recommendations (what size, if any, of this garment will fit me?), emphasizing the challenges introduced by the need to have scalable solutions.
Lunch will be provided. Registration is required.
Larry Davis is a Senior Principal Scientist in Amazon’s Fashion and Fitness organization. He joined Amazon in 2018 after a long career in academics. At Amazon he worked on introducing novel customer experiences for fashion shopping like outfit builder (based on complementary recommendations) and virtual try on. He led Amazon’s first GenAI team for image and video synthesis, developing models to diversify the catalogue to make it more relatable for our customers. . He received his Ph. D. from the University of Maryland in 1975 and from 1977-1981 was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas in Austin. He returned to the University of Maryland in 1981 and was the founding Director of the University’s Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (1985-1994). He also served as Chair of the Department of Computer Science from 2000-2012. Larry retired from the University in 2021 and is now a Professor Emeritus and a College Park Professor. He advised more than 75 Ph. D. students at Texas and Maryland. His work spanned many aspects of computer vision, including applications in visual navigation, robotic vision, media forensics, remote sensing,fashion and fundamental problems of object detection and activity recognition. He is a Fellow of both the IEEE and the ACM.
Time
Tuesday, May 12, 2026 at 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Location
Calendar
Northwestern Network for Collaborative Intelligence (NNCI)