News

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

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

Visual Activism: Erin McElroy | UC Berkeley Arts Research Center

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

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.”