News

Keeping an Eye on Landlord Tech

The landlord tech industry, while alive and well prior to COVID-19, has ramped up in the past year to develop new ways to accumulate wealth at the expense of tenants.

Video – Whistleblower Aid & AI Now: How Tech Workers Can Blow the Whistle Workshop

Ifeoma Ozoma, Veena Dubal, Meredith Whittaker from the AI Now Institute and John Tye from Whistleblower Aid for a tech-worker focused webinar, covering the basics of safe whistleblowing and your rights as a worker.

Algorithmic Accountability for the Public Sector: learning from the first wave of policy implementation

The AI Now Institute, Ada Lovelace Institute, and the Open Government Partnership (OGP) are partnering to launch the first global study evaluating this initial wave of algorithmic accountability policy.

Distinguished Speaker Series: AI and Inequalities – Creating Change | Hariri Institute for Computing, Boston University

Panel on AI, Inequality, and Big Tech, featuring Timnit Gebru, Sabelo Mhlambi and Meredith Whittaker

Smile for the camera: the dark side of China’s emotion-recognition tech

“If anything, research and investigative reporting over the last few years have shown that sensitive personal information is particularly dangerous when in the hands of state entities, especially given the wide ambit of their possible use by state actors.”

FAQs — A New AI Lexicon

China’s Big Tech clampdown: Why some businesses stand to benefit

“I’m not surprised that the pendulum swung one way and there was all this room for experimentation and now it’s swinging back the other way and you actually can’t do these things,” said Shazeda Ahmed, a visiting researcher at New York University’s AI Now Institute who has extensively studied the relationships between China’s tech industry and the local, provincial and central government.

Call for Contributors ‘A New AI Lexicon: Responses and Challenges to the Critical AI discourse’

Montreal AI Ethics Insitute’s The State of AI Ethics Panel (Dec 2020)

National Science Policy Symposium 2020 Panel: Systemic Barriers in Equity and Access to Technology

Sarah Myers West spoke together with Nicol Turner-Lee, and Tyrone Grandison. Technology is an integral part of our everyday lives through broad-band internet usage, protection of cyber-security security, or the usage of artifical intelligence (AI) to mimic human-operations. Historically, technology has perpetuated racial discrimination with biases in algorthims used in the health-care system, facial recognition in the criminal justice system, to Black and Latinx students lacking access to technological resources. This panel will discuss the historical context of racism in technology, current technology access issues in communities of color, as well as strategies and policies that dismantle systemic racism in technology.

Visual Activism: Erin McElroy | UC Berkeley Arts Research Center

Discriminating Systems: Gender, Race and Power in Artificial Intelligence at the Indiana University Informatics Colloquium

Sarah Myers West gave a colloquium talk about discrimination in artificial intelligence for Indiana University's Informatics Colloquium. The artificial intelligence industry is in the midst of a crisis in diversity and inclusion: while the representation of women in computer science recently fell below levels in the 1960s, inclusion across lines of race, gender, and ability in AI appear to be even worse. This is reflected in biased artificial intelligence systems: voice recognition that can’t ‘hear’ women’s voices, facial identification systems that struggle to identify darker skin pigmentation and trans people, and autonomous vehicles that present safety risks to children and disabled people. This keynote will survey the landscape of gender, race and power in the field of artificial intelligence, and its implications for algorithmic injustice.

Informal Livelihoods and the Gig Economy | Amit Basole and Noopur Raval | Rethinking Economics India

Twitter probes alleged racial bias in image cropping feature

"This is another in a long and weary litany of examples that show automated systems encoding racism, misogyny and histories of discrimination."

Questions swirl about possible racial bias in Twitter

Sarah Myers West, a postdoctoral researcher at New York University’s AI Now Institute, told CNBC: “Algorithmic discrimination is a reflection of larger patterns of social inequality … it’s about much more than just bias on the part of engineers or even bias in datasets, and will require more than a shallow understanding or set of fixes.”

Fake Data Could Help Solve Machine Learning’s Bias Problem—if We Let It

“That process of creating a synthetic data set, depending on what you’re extrapolating from and how you’re doing that, can actually exacerbate the biases,” says Deb Raji, a technology fellow at the AI Now Institute.

‘Encoding the same biases’: Artificial intelligence’s limitations in coronavirus response

"We were seeing AI being used extensively before Covid-19, and during Covid-19 you're seeing an increase in the use of some types of tools," noted Meredith Whittaker, a distinguished research scientist at New York University in the US and co-founder of AI Now Institute, which carries out research examining the social implications of AI.

AI Weekly: A biometric surveillance state is not inevitable, says AI Now Institute

In a new report called “Regulating Biometrics: Global Approaches and Urgent Questions,” the AI Now Institute says regulation advocates are beginning to believe a biometric surveillance state is not inevitable.