​Whose story survives the algorithm?

​Every person who leaves a home for good carries a story. These stories are fragile: they shift with every retelling, every form, every interview at an immigration office. Now algorithms are entering that process: evaluating asylum claims, sorting biometric data, generating risk profiles. What they produce is a machine-generated version of a life. A version that can be decisive.

​But the pressure is real on both sides. Asylum offices across Europe are buried in thousands of unprocessed applications. AI promises relief.

​As we lean into these tools, we must ask the difficult questions:

• ​Who holds the pen? Who is writing the code that decides who stays and who goes?

• ​Can a machine understand trauma? AI is built for patterns and data, but migration is defined by the unique and the unpredictable.

• ​The Right to Forget: For those fleeing a painful past, is the "perfect memory" of an AI a gift or a cage? What happens to a refugee’s right to start over?

​Join us for an evening that goes beyond the headlines, with expert perspectives, a hands-on AI exercise, and an honest conversation about memory, migration, and the machines that are quietly reshaping both.

​What to Expect

​18:00 – Doors Open & Finger Food & Drinks

​(food available on a first come, first serve basis, so arrive on time!)

​18:30 – Welcome & Framing — Karin Garcia sets the stage: how stories, memory, and migration intersect — and why AI forces us to rethink whose memories get preserved, distorted, or erased.

​19:00 – Expert Insights — Three short inputs followed by a moderated dialogue:

• ​Roshan Melwani (Oxford Institute for Technology and Justice): the human rights lens. Surveillance, bias, and the erasure of migrant voices in AI systems.

• ​Manuela Verduci (Kiron Digital Learning Solutions): the practical lens. How digital tools empower migrant communities

• ​Mekonnen Mesghena (Heinrich Böll Foundation): the policy lens. How German authorities are thinking about deploying AI in migration governance, under what pressures, and what civil society is doing about it.

​19:30 – Interactive Exercise: At four stations with differently tuned AI prompts, participant feed the same -potentially migration- story through different algorithmic filters and see what comes out. What does the AI add? Distort? Erase?

​20:00 – Collective Synthesis: A harvest discussion: what patterns emerged across the stations? What did it feel like to watch a memory get reshaped by a machine?

​20:15 – Networking

​Who is this for

• ​People working in policy, tech ethics, AI governance, or digital rights

• ​Migration and refugee practitioners, advocates, and policymakers

• ​Journalists, researchers, and academics in migration, philosophy, or media studies

• ​Designers and builders of digital tools for underserved communities

• ​Anyone curious about how AI is quietly reshaping whose stories count

​If you want to experience what happens when an algorithm meets a human story, this evening is for you.

​Limited seats only. Free admission.

​About the speakers

​Roshan Melwani is a Research Officer at the Oxford Institute for Technology and Justice, with 10 years of experience across human rights law, UNHCR, and an AI non-profit. He has advised UK refugee organisations such as Freedom from Torture and the Helen Bamber Foundation on policy advocacy relating to the Home Office's deployment of AI tools within the asylum system.

​Manuela Verduci is the CEO of Kiron Digital Learning Solutions, whose mission is to provide access to education for refugees and underserved communities worldwide. She leads one of Germany's most successful integration programs and is a published author in the fields of philosophy, migration, and diversity. She also teaches Ethics and Philosophy of Technology to international tech entrepreneurs.

​Mekonnen Mesghena is a German journalist and policy analyst serving as the Head of Migration & Diversity at the Heinrich Böll Foundation. By advocating for institutional diversity and modern citizenship, he works to increase minority representation across politics, academia, and journalism. As editor-in-chief of the Heimatkunde portal and co-founder of Media Watch Germany, he remains at the forefront of debates on migration and asylum policy.

​About the host

​Karin Garcia is the founding editor of ΦAI (phiand.ai), an international online magazine and writers' collective exploring AI through a humanistic lens. A philosopher and economist by training (University of St. Gallen) and a startup operator turned writer, she creates spaces (in print and in person) where technology meets the deeper questions it tends to sidestep.

​About the organizers

​ΦAI (phiand.ai) is a writer-led online magazine dedicated to rigorous, interdisciplinary dialogue about the societal, ethical, and existential dimensions of artificial intelligence through thoughtful writing, collective inquiry, and a commitment to humanistic understanding.

​Foresight Institute at CIC Berlin convenes thinkers and builders working on long-term beneficial technology.

​AEthos provides the venue and community infrastructure at CIC Berlin.

​Our Sponsor

​Heinrich Böll Foundation is one of Germany's leading political foundations, working internationally on democracy, ecology, and human rights.