Seda Gürses is an Associate Professor in the Department of Multi-Actor Systems at TU Delft at the Faculty of Technology Policy and Management, a member of The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest and an affiliate at the COSIC Group at the Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT), KU Leuven. Beyond her academic work, she collaborated with artistic initiatives including Constant vzw, Bootlab, De-center, ESC in Brussels, Graz and Berlin. She is currently part of The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest[^ttp], a trans-practice gathering of activists, artists, engineers and theorists initiated by Myriam Aouragh, Helen Pritchard, Femke Snelting and herself.
Furthermore, in the paper *POTs (Protective Optimization Technologies)*[^pots] she co-wrote together with Bogdan Lulynych, Rebekah Overdorf and Carmela Troncoso, she proposes forms of critical *optimization* practices. Such practices "aim at addressing risks and harms that cannot be captured from the fairness perspective and cannot be addressed without a cooperative service provider"[add page number]. The paper questions current "fairness" approaches, by questioning their limitations and creating space for community-inclusive ways to review them. Following Michael A. Jackson’s theory of requirements engineering, it also proposes to approach computational infrastructures as being far more than a technological system alone, thus shifting focus from the system itself to the economical, political and social context in which it operates.
By questioning how technologies could *optimize* their mode of operation in a truly just way, *POTs* provide "means for affected parties to address negative impacts of digital systems" [page number]. The work departs from a thorough consideration of multiple forms of *harm* caused by computational infrastructures framed as *externalities*[^externalities]. Examples of such externalities include lack of privacy, discrimination, low wages and surveillance. How a *POT* might engage with them is then illustrated through a range of activist, artistic and deployed examples of repurposed optimization technologies that "correct, shift or expose these harms".
[^titipi]: Miriyam Aouragh, Seda Gürses, Femke Snelting, Helen Pritchard "The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest" (accessed on 2020) <http://titipi.org/>
[^externalities]: *Externalities* is one of the concepts and phrases in the paper that are borrowed from software and requirements engineering, and from economics and social sciences.
