Yeshimabeit Milner is founder and executive director of Data for Black Lives: a movement of activists, organisers, scientists, and engineers committed to the mission of using data science to create concrete and measurable change in the lives of Black people.
For far too long, data and technology have been weaponised against Black communities, reinforcing inequality and perpetuating injustice. But we know that new advances in data science and technology can and will be powerful instruments for social change. In this lecture Yeshimabeit Milner will expand on these themes.

About the lecture 'Abolish Big Data' Yeshimabeit Milner says:
Big Data is more than a collection of technologies, more than a revolution in measurement and prediction. It has become a philosophy, an ideological regime, one that determines how decisions are made and who makes them. It has given legitimacy to a new form of social and political control, one that has taken the digital traces of our existence and found ways to use them against us. Big Data is part of a long and pervasive historical legacy of scientific oppression, aggressive public policy, and the most influential political and economic institution that has and continues to shape the global economy: chattel slavery. This talk serves as a call to action to reject the concentration of Big Data in the hands of a few, to challenge the structures that allow data to be wielded as a weapon of immense political influence. To abolish Big Data would mean to put data in the hands of people who need it the most. To Abolish Big Data would require all of us to imagine and strive for a social landscape where the values of justice, equality and solidarity are optimised.

Yeshimabeit Milner is founder and executive director of Data for Black Lives. Raised in Miami, FL, Yeshimabeit began organising against the school-to-prison pipeline at Power U Center for Social Change as a high school senior. There she developed a lifelong commitment to movement building as a vehicle for creating and sustaining large-scale social change. Yeshimabeit returned to Power U in 2013 to lead a victorious campaign to improve breastfeeding policies at the largest public hospital in the country. More recently, she was a campaign manager at Color of Change, where she spearheaded several major national initiatives, including OrganizeFor, the only online petition platform dedicated to building the political voice of Black people, and a successful campaign to remove Bill O’Reilly from television. She has a BA from Brown University and serves on the board of the Highlander Center in Tennessee.