News

“What on earth are they doing?”: AI ethics experts react to Google doubling embattled ethics team

“It sounds like a very desperate kind of cover-your-ass move from a company that is really unsure about how to continue to do business as usual in the face of a growing outcry around the harms and implications of their technologies.”

Europe throws down gauntlet on AI with new rulebook

These are signs that the U.S. is entering a new era of regulation, said Meredith Whittaker of the AI Now Institute at New York University. "It remains to be seen how they use that power, but we are seeing at least in that agency a turn to a much more offensive stance for Big Tech," said Whittaker.

In scramble to respond to Covid-19, hospitals turned to models with high risk of bias

"Hard decisions are being made at hospitals all the time, especially in this space, but I’m worried about algorithms being the idea of where the responsibility gets shifted," said Varoon Mathur, a technology fellow at NYU’s AI Now Institute, in a Zoom interview.

U.S. Lawmakers Pressure DOJ Over Funding of Predictive Policing Tools

The lawmakers pointed to a 2019 study from New York University School of Law and NYU’s AI Now Institute which discovered predictive policing systems being trained on what the researchers call "dirty data," or data derived from "corrupt, biased, and unlawful practices."...

Ethical, Legal & Social Implications of machine learning in genomics | National Human Genome Research Institute | Varoon Mathur

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