Cavalcante Silva, Guilherme | Brazil

Guilherme Cavalcante Silva (he/him) is a PhD candidate in the Graduate Program of Science & Technology Studies at York University, Canada. He has a MA in Science and Culture Communication from the University of Campinas (Unicamp), Brazil. He did his undergraduate studies at Brazil Adventist University, where he graduated in Social Communication and Theology. He is currently Assistant Editor for the Global South at the Portal Backchannels, Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S). His current research focuses on the intersections between science and technology policy and development frameworks in Latin America, with focus on Brazil. Besides his current interests, Guilherme has navigated through fields such as critical data studies, philosophy of technology, and political communication throughout his career, always concerned with the political, social, and economic implications of technological development.

Project at IAS-STS: Creating a room for AI research in Brazil: which kinds of knowledge agendas, practices, and societal goals are being mobilized?

Departing from the understanding that both policy and scientific research are not the product of planned, rational, and unilateral decision-making, processes in which the roles of those involved are perfectly stable and clear (Godin and Vicky, 2017), the research (part of a future research paper) focuses on the social life of AI policy beyond the universe of policymakers and documents. It investigates the impact of AI policy on AI research, having as its study object the Brazilian Institute of Data Science, one of Brazil's first publicly funded AI research institutes. It seeks to answer: how do scientists shape their research objectives in light of policy strategies? How do AI researchers inBrazil articulate the socioeconomic goals of their research? How does that compare to what is seen at the policy level?This research is part of a dissertation project that ultimately uses a contemporary technological development (artificial intelligence) to shed light on how actors, ideas, and institutions are mobilized in science and technology policy in a peripheral context like Brazil.
 

Selected Publications:

Silva, G.C. (2019). North perspectives for a better South? Big Data and the Global South in Big Data & Society. Interações: Sociedade e as Novas Modernidades, 37, 84-107. doi: https://doi.org/10.31211/interacoes.n37.2019.a4

Silva, G.C. (2022). From data revolution to data narratives. Science as Culture, 32(1), 160-164.

Silva, G.C.; Tomaz, T. (2021). Big Data as “practical ontology”: the ontotheology underlying the interpretation of reality as data. Athena: Philosophical Studies, 16, 12-23. https://doi.org/10.53631/Athena.2021.16.1

Birch, K.; Marquis, S.; Silva, G.C. (2024). Understanding data valuation: valuing Google’s data assets. IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society. DOI: 10.1109/TTS.2024.3398400

Silva, G.C., Vicentin, D. (2024). Lidando com os cânones: uma análise dos estudos críticos sobre dados a partir da Big Data & Society [Dealing with the canons: a survey of critical data studies in Big Data & Society]. In: A. Carnauskas, G. Barata, M. Barbai, RO. Carreon, S. Dias (Eds.). Divulgação científica e cultural: 16 anos de um curso de PósGraduação. Campinas: Pontes Editores, p. 173-196.