Kelly Gates

About

Professor Kelly Gates is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Science Studies at UC San Diego. Her research focuses on the critical analysis of digital media technologies, with particular emphasis on the politics and social implications of computerization and surveillance in the United States from the mid-twentieth century to the present. She has authored the book 'Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance,' which explores the social construction of automated facial recognition and facial expression analysis, emphasizing that no computer vision program can be culturally neutral. Her work examines how these technologies shape and redefine notions of humanity and social practices. Her 2025 book, 'Targeted: Corporations and the Police Surveillance Economy,' investigates the role of video content and infrastructure in modern policing and security, highlighting the entanglement of police and corporate interests through video forensics, private surveillance, body-worn cameras, and video analytics. At UCSD, she teaches courses on the history of communication research, the Internet and society, visual culture, and surveillance. She holds a PhD in Communications Research from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, earned in 2004.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Business
• Literature
• Law
• Aesthetics
• Art
• History
• Economics

Selected publications

• Our Biometric Future

  New York University Press eBooks · 2016-04-19 · 275 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Since the 1960s, a significant effort has been underway to program computers to “see” the human face—to develop automated systems for identifying faces and distinguishing them from one another—commonly known as Facial Recognition Technology (FRT). While computer scientists are developing FRT in order to design more intelligent and interactive machines, businesses and states agencies view the technology as uniquely suited for “smart” surveillance—systems that automate the labor of monitoring in o…

  PublisherDOI

• Big Data Surveillance: Introduction

  Surveillance & Society · 2014-05-09 · 223 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  If conventional definitions of surveillance emphasize its systematic and targeted character (the notion that there is a specific "object" of surveillance), both aspects undergo some significant modifications when the goal is, generally speaking, to capture as much data as possible about everything, all the time, and hold on to it forever. [...]the ambitious scope of such surveillance raises a host of important issues associated with the infrastructure for collecting and storing huge amounts of d…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The cultural labor of surveillance: video forensics, computational objectivity, and the production of visual evidence

  Social Semiotics · 2013-03-13 · 62 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This essay argues that the status of video evidence as an index of real events—a sign or representation that offers a direct, empirical connection to material reality—is the result of an intentional process of production. This process involves the repurposing of new technologies borrowed from the domain of creative media production in order to transform a chaotic field of raw surveillance video into useable evidence. In addition to the exchange in technologies, an unavoidable epistemological and…

  PublisherDOI

• Policing as Digital Platform

  Surveillance & Society · 2019-03-31 · 26 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Much of the discussion about platforms and “platform capitalism” centers on commercial platform companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple. Shoshana Zuboff’s (2015) analysis of “surveillance capitalism” similarly focuses on Google as the trailblazer pushing the new logic of accumulation that is focused on data extraction and analysis of human activities. In his typology of platform companies, Nick Srnicek (2017) includes less visible industrial platforms that situate themselves as interm…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Media Evidence and Forensic Journalism

  Surveillance & Society · 2020 · 19 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  This essay engages with the question of surveillance and evidence by considering the use of media forensics in journalistic storytelling. The use of video evidence and other data derived from surveillance systems to assemble investigative news results in a documentary form of what Thomas Levin (2002) calls surveillant narration—a tendency in cinema to treat surveillance thematically while at the same time incorporating it into the structure of the narration itself. If using surveillance as the s…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Dawn Muir

  University of Northern Colorado

  4 shared

• A‐K. Eckermann

  4 shared

• Mary Hammill

  Fisheries and Oceans Canada

  4 shared

• Noel Morich

  Universities UK

  4 shared

• Raeme Goves-Jacka

  4 shared

• Christopher Kenworthy

  4 shared

• R. B. Forrest

  Universities UK

  4 shared

• Michael Christie

  Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology

  4 shared

Education

• PhD, Institute of Communications Research

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  2004

• Mass Communication, Mass Communication

  Miami University

  1993

• Advertising, Communication

  Pennsylvania State University

  1991

Similar researchers at University of California, San Diego

• Patrick Andersonh-23
• Morana Alach-11
• Fernando Domínguez Rubioh-10