The Critical Machine Learning Studies Working Group is composed of humanities researchers across the University of California system.

Our collective areas of expertise and interest include digital humanities, STS, history of science, law, digital media theory, computer vision, and more.

Principal Investigators:

Fabian Offert, UC Santa Barbara

Fabian Offert is Assistant Professor for the History and Theory of the Digital Humanities at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research and teaching focuses on the visual digital humanities, with a special interest in the epistemology and aesthetics of computer vision and machine learning. In addition to the "Critical Machine Learning Studies" research group, he is also principal investigator of the international research project "AI Forensics" (2022-25), funded by the VW foundation. Before joining the faculty at UCSB, Fabian served as postdoctoral researcher in the DFG SPP "The Digital Image", associated researcher in the Critical Artificial Intelligence Group (KIM) at Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, and Assistant Curator at ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany.

Rita Raley, UC Santa Barbara

Rita Raley is Professor of English, with courtesy appointments in Film and Media Studies, Comparative Literature, and Global Studies. Her primary research interests lie at the intersection of digital media and humanist inquiry, with a particular emphasis on cultural critique, artistic practices, language, and textuality. She is the author of Tactical Media (University of Minnesota, 2009), co-editor of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2 (2011), and has more recently published articles on interventionist media arts practices, digital poetics, and global English. She has had fellowship appointments at the National Humanities Center and UCLA, as part of the Mellon-funded project on the Digital Humanities, and has taught at Rice and the University of Minnesota. In Spring 2011 she held a short-term Fulbright appointment with “ELMCIP: Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice” at the University of Bergen, Norway; and in December 2011 she was a writer in residence hosted by the Dutch Foundation for Literature in Amsterdam. In 2012-2013 she was a visiting Associate Professor in English at NYU. She co-edits the "Electronic Mediations" book series for the University of Minnesota Press and is an Associate Editor for ASAP/Journal.

Working group members:

Jacob Gaboury, UC Berkeley

Jacob Gaboury is an Associate Professor of Film & Media at the University of California at Berkeley, specializing in the seventy-year history of digital image technologies and their impact on our contemporary visual culture. He has held numerous fellowships from institutions across the humanities, sciences, and the arts, including the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Internationale Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie, the Association of Computing Machinery, the Smithsonian Institute, and the Social Science Research Council; and his work has appeared in a range of popular and academic publications, including Grey Room, the Journal of Visual Culture, Rhizome, Art Papers, and Camera Obscura. His first book was published in 2021 with MIT Press, and is titled Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics.

Colin Milburn, UC Davis

Colin Milburn's research focuses on the relations of literature, science, and technology. His interests include science fiction, gothic horror, the history of biology, the history of physics, nanotechnology, video games, and the digital humanities. He is a professor in the English Department, the Science and Technology Studies Department, and the Cinema and Digital Media Department. He is also affiliated with the programs in Cultural Studies, Performance Studies, and Critical Theory, as well as the Center for Science and Innovation Studies. He is the department chair of the Science and Technology Studies Department, as well as the director of the ModLab digital humanities laboratory.

Kriss Ravetto, UCLA

Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli is a film and media scholar whose work focuses on representations and theorizations of violence in film, media, and social media.

She is the author of The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), Mythopoetic Cinema: On the Ruins of European Identity (Columbia University Press, 2017), Digital Uncanny (Oxford University Press, 2019) and is currently working on a co-authored book project with Martine Beugnet entitled The Trouble with Ghosts.

Ravetto-Biagioli has published articles on film, performance, installation art, computational media, the hacker group Anonymous, surveillance and dance in Theory, Culture & Society, Body & Society, Screen, Film-Philosophy, Camera Obscura, Representations, [In]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image, Film Quarterly, LEA, PAJ, Screen, International Social Science Journal, Third Text, ARTMargins and numerous collected volumes. She is the co-editor with Professor Martine Beugnet of the Edinburgh University Press series in Film and Intermediality.

Ravetto-Biagioli is the recipient of the Mellon-Sawyer on Surveillance and Democracy (2015-2016), and the Mellon Research Initiative Grant in the Humanities for Digital Culture (2012-16).

Before coming to UCLA TFT, she taught at UC Davis, the University of Aberdeen and the University of Edinburgh.