Benedetta Catanzariti

Benedetta Catanzariti (she/her) is a Policy Fellow under the AHRC Bridging Responsible AI Divides (BRAID) programme at the University of Edinburgh. Her work sits at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies and feminist studies and investigates the interplay of power, vision, and knowledge in machine learning. Her PhD, concluded in 2023, investigated the social and cultural dimensions that inform the development of affective computing technologies, that is, machine learning models designed to track and recognize affective expressions based on changes in facial and bodily behaviours. She also co-runs the postgraduate course in ‘Ethical Data Futures’ at the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI).  

Key research projects/ publications include: 

• Catanzariti, B., (2022).  “Facial Recognition and The Right to Appear: Infrastructural Challenges in Anti-Surveillance Resistance", in Currie, M., J. Knox & C. McGregor (eds.). Data Justice & the Right to the City. University of Edinburgh Press.
• Catanzariti, B., (2022). “How to Use Mechanical Turk Ethically”, in SAGE Research Methods. Doing Research Online.
• Catanzariti, B., Chandhiramowuli, S., Mohamed, S., Natarajan, S., Prabhat, S., Raval, N., Taylor, A., S., Wang, D. (2021). “The Global Labours of AI and Data Intensive Systems.” In Companion Publication of the 2021 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW).