Data & Society is pleased to share that our current Postdoctoral Scholar Ranjit Singh, along with his co-author Steven Jackson (Cornell University), will be awarded a CSCW 2021 Best Paper Award for  “Seeing Like an Infrastructure: Low-resolution Citizens and the Aadhaar Identification Project,” to be officially presented later this month at the 24th ACM conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative work on Social Computing (CSCW). CSCW is the premier venue for research in the design and use of technologies that affect groups, organizations, communities, and networks.

The paper explores the development of Aadhaar, the biometrics-based national identification infrastructure of India, tracing its sociotechnical, legal, and administrative development and the social and moral issues that arise through data-driven governance. At Data & Society, Singh sits on the AI on the Ground team where his research on the intersection of data infrastructures, global development, and public policy has him launching a new project to map the conceptual vocabulary of digital IDs and AI in the Global South. He is also co-host of this week’s new Data & Society narrative workshop, Parables of AI in/from the Global South.

You can read more about the awards here.