Michael Castelle
Associate Professor
Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (CIM)
University of Warwick
M.Castelle.1 @ warwick.ac.uk
[Homepage at CIM Warwick]
Teaching
Generative AI: Histories, Techniques, Cultures, and Impacts — 2024-present
Scaling Data & Societies — 2023-present
Introduction to Contemporary AI: Techniques and Critiques — 2019-present
Big Data Research: Hype or Revolution? — 2017-2021, 2024-present
Posts / Essays
September 28 2018 “Social Theory for Generative Networks (and Vice Versa)”
September 15 2018 “Deep Learning as an Epistemic Ensemble”
Upcoming Work
2025 "Contextualizing High-Dimensional Communication: The Relevance of Linguistic Anthropology for Theorizing Large Language Models".
Publications
2024 “AI as Super-Controversy: Shaping and Re-shaping AI Research Controversies with an Extended Peer Community in the UK” (co-authored with N. Marres, C. Polleti, B. Gobbo, J. Tripp). Big Data & Society (Special Issue on Artificial Intelligence Controversies) [Open Access].
2022 “Sapir’s Thought-Grooves and Whorf’s Tensors: Reconciling Transformer Architectures with Cultural Anthropology”, NeurIPS 2022 Workshop on Cultures in AI/AI in Culture.
2021 “What Kind of Learning Is Machine Learning?”, with T. Reigeluth (Université libre de Bruxelles), in Roberge & Castelle 2021, The Cultural Life of Machine Learning, pp. 91-115.
2021 “Toward an End-to-End Sociology of 21st-Century Machine Learning”, with Jonathan Roberge (INRS Montréal), in Roberge & Castelle, The Cultural Life of Machine Learning, pp. 1-29.
2021 The Cultural Life of Machine Learning: An Incursion into Critical AI Studies — edited volume with Palgrave New York. Co-edited with Jonathan Roberge (Associate Professor at INRS Montréal), pp. 1-298.
2020 “The Social Lives of Generative Adversarial Networks”. ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT*) (now FAccT). (Preprint of full version available)
2019 “Cost-Sensitive BERT for Generalisable Sentence Classification with Imbalanced Data” with H. Madabushi and E. Kochkina for EMNLP (Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing), Workshop on NLP for Internet Freedom (NLP4IF): Censorship, Disinformation, and Propaganda.
2019 “Middleware's Message: The Financial Technics of Codata”, Philosophy & Technology [Open Access].
2018 “The Linguistic Ideologies of Deep Abusive Language Classification”. 2nd Abusive Language Workshop, EMNLP (Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing).
2017 “Transaction and Message: From Database to Marketplace, 1970-2000”. Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago.
2016 “Marketplace platforms or exchanges? Financial metaphors for regulating the collaborative economy”. Economic Sociology: European Electronic Newsletter, Vol. 17, No. 3, July 2016.
2016 “Where do Electronic Markets Come From? Regulation and the Transformation of Financial Exchanges” (with Yuval Millo (University of Warwick), Daniel Beunza (London School of Economics), and David Lubin (University of Chicago)). Economy and Society, 45(2), 166-200.
2013 “Relational and Non-Relational Models in the Entextualization of Bureaucracy.” Computational Culture (3).
Recent Presentations and Co-Organized Conferences
2024 Open Panel LLMs and the Language Sciences: Material, Semiotic, and Linguistic Perspectives from STS and Linguistic Anthropology, co-convenor with Anna Weichselbraun (University of Vienna) and Siri Lamoureaux (University of Siegen), Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S), 16-19 July 2024.
2024 “Contextualizing High-Dimensional Communication: The Relevance of Linguistic Anthropology for Theorizing Large Language Models”, Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S), 16-19 July 2024.
2024 “The Transformer Models and Their Implications”, Cambridge AI Ethics and Society MSt Residential Session, June 2024 (Invited Lecture)
2023 "What's so Statistical About Generative LLMs?", Generative Methods: AI as Collaborator and Companion in the Social Sciences and Humanities, Aalborg University Copenhagen Campus, 8th December 2023.
2023 “Text as Task: A Guide to the Transformer Architecture and its Language Ideologies”, Technolinguistics in Practice: Socially Situating Language in AI Systems, University of Siegen, 24th-26th May 2023 (Invited Keynote)
2023 “ChatGPT as an an Epistemic Consumption Object”, 3rd International Conference ‘Language in the Human-Machine Era’ (LITHME), University of Groningen — Campus Fryslân, 15th-16th May 2023
2023 “Transformer Models and Their Implications”, Cambridge AI Ethics and Society MSt Residential Session, 9th January 2023 (Invited Lecture)
2022 “The Transformer Architecture and its Implications”, Language in the Human-Machine Era (LITHME) Working Group 6, 27th October 2022 (Invited Presentation)
2022 “Loss, Agents, and Alignment: Ideologies of Economic Rationality in Artificial Intelligence” at “The Global Politics of Artificial Intelligence: Historical, Comparative, and Critical Perspectives”, hosted by the Academy of International Affairs NRW (Bonn, Germany), 23rd June 2022. (Invited Presentation)
2022 “Communicating (with) AI? Research controversies and their publics” with Noortje Marres and Chiara Poletti (part of ORA grant research), International Communication Association, 27th May 2022.
2021 “21st-Century Artificial Intelligence and the New Ethics of AI” presented at workshop series “Ethics for Computational Research” for N8 Centre of Excellence in Computationally Intensive Research (N8 CIR — research partnership for Durham, Lancaster, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield and York), 11th November 2021.
2021 “The Role of Economic Rationality in Artificial Intelligence” presented at Winter Symposium for “Histories of Artificial Intelligence: A Genealogy of Power” at Homerton College, University of Cambridge, 14th-15th December 2021.
2021 “Shaping AI: Who’s afraid of big methodological, historical, political questions?”, session at 4S (Society for Social Studies of Science), Oct 6-9 2021.
2021 “The Economic Origins of Connectionist Practice”, presented at Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE), 2-5 July 2021.
2020 "A Feeling for the (Neural) Organism: An Interactive History of Connectionism", interactive workshop held at University of Cambridge as part of Histories of AI seminar, 28th October (Invited Tutorial/Workshop)
2020 “Multilingual Transformers: Linguistic Relativity for the 21st Century”, Disrupting Digital Monolingualism, King’s College London [moved online], 16-17th June 2020. (Video available)
2020 “The Social Lives of Generative Adversarial Networks", ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT*), Barcelona, 29 January 2020. (Video available)
2019 “The Architecture of ‘Attention’: Uncrumpling NLP’s Linguistic Ideologies", Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), New Orleans, 5th September 2019.
2019 “Are Neural Networks Neoclassical? Utility, Cost, and Loss from Wald to TensorFlow”, Towards a History of Artificial Intelligence, Workshop at Columbia University, 23 May 2019. (Video available)
2018 The Cultural Life of Machine Learning: An Incursion into Critical AI Studies, Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) 1-day Preconference; co-organized with Jonathan Roberge and Thomas Crosbie. Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS), Montréal, 10th October 2018.
2018 “Social Theory for Generative Networks, and Vice Versa", Creative AI Meetup, London, 2nd July 2018.
2018 “Deep Learning and the Coming Crisis/Opportunity for Social Theory”: * The Thinking Machine: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Neural Networks, Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, 22nd August 2018. * Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies Research Forum, University of Warwick, 2nd May 2018. * Beyond Code and Craft, Franke Institute for the Humanities, University of Chicago, 28th April 2018.
2018 “Middleware’s Presentism: Asynchrony, Flow, Finance, and the Enterprise”, History and Philosophy of Programming (HaPoP), Oxford UK, 23rd March 2018.
2017 “Brokers, Queues, and Flows: Techniques of Financialization and Consolidation”, Data Power, 22nd June 2017, Carleton University. (Video available) (Slides available)