DATE 20 October

TIME 1:30 pm

VENUE Iscte, Building 4, Room B226

SPEAKER Helena Machado, Researcher at CIES-Iscte and Principal Investigator of fAIces

How can we empirically trace facial AI technologies as they circulate across different social worlds, contexts and domains of application? And what happens to the object of research when we change our point of entry? Drawing on the ongoing work of the fAIces project, this talk explores different ways of tracing facial AI: from mapping scientific output and the corporate landscape to interviewing scientists, engaging with civil society organisations and Black communities, and following artists, exhibitions and artistic practices. Rather than presenting a settled methodological design, it discusses how different points of entry into the field make different versions of the object visible, raise distinct challenges of access, delimitation and integration across methods, and require us to continually question where what we call ‘facial AI’ begins and ends.

Helena Machado is Principal Investigator of the project fAIces – Facial Recognition Technologies: Etho-Assemblages and Alternative Futures, funded by a European Research Council Advanced Grant.

She holds a PhD in Sociology and conducts research at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Social Studies of Artificial Intelligence and empirical ethics. Her work examines how emerging technologies co-produce institutions, forms of governance, rights and inequalities, with a particular focus on infrastructures for human identification. More recently, she has expanded this research agenda to explore the ethical and social implications of artificial intelligence in healthcare, bringing together insights from sociology, STS and bioethics.

Within the fAIces project, she investigates the interconnected roles of scientists, technology companies, policymakers, civil society organisations and affected communities in the development of facial recognition technologies and the shaping of alternative futures for artificial intelligence. Alongside this work, she conducted research on the ethical governance of AI and biometric technologies in healthcare settings, in collaboration with the Centre for Research Ethics and Bioethics (CRB) at Uppsala University (September 2025–May 2026).