2,942 research outputs found
The Faculty Notebook, September 2017
The Faculty Notebook is published periodically by the Office of the Provost at Gettysburg College to bring to the attention of the campus community accomplishments and activities of academic interest. Faculty are encouraged to submit materials for consideration for publication to the Associate Provost for Faculty Development. Copies of this publication are available at the Office of the Provost
The Faculty Notebook, September 2019
The Faculty Notebook is published periodically by the Office of the Provost at Gettysburg College to bring to the attention of the campus community accomplishments and activities of academic interest. Faculty are encouraged to submit materials for consideration for publication to the Associate Provost for Faculty Development. Copies of this publication are available at the Office of the Provost
AI for the Common Good?! Pitfalls, challenges, and Ethics Pen-Testing
Recently, many AI researchers and practitioners have embarked on research
visions that involve doing AI for "Good". This is part of a general drive
towards infusing AI research and practice with ethical thinking. One frequent
theme in current ethical guidelines is the requirement that AI be good for all,
or: contribute to the Common Good. But what is the Common Good, and is it
enough to want to be good? Via four lead questions, I will illustrate
challenges and pitfalls when determining, from an AI point of view, what the
Common Good is and how it can be enhanced by AI. The questions are: What is the
problem / What is a problem?, Who defines the problem?, What is the role of
knowledge?, and What are important side effects and dynamics? The illustration
will use an example from the domain of "AI for Social Good", more specifically
"Data Science for Social Good". Even if the importance of these questions may
be known at an abstract level, they do not get asked sufficiently in practice,
as shown by an exploratory study of 99 contributions to recent conferences in
the field. Turning these challenges and pitfalls into a positive
recommendation, as a conclusion I will draw on another characteristic of
computer-science thinking and practice to make these impediments visible and
attenuate them: "attacks" as a method for improving design. This results in the
proposal of ethics pen-testing as a method for helping AI designs to better
contribute to the Common Good.Comment: to appear in Paladyn. Journal of Behavioral Robotics; accepted on
27-10-201
Improving fairness in machine learning systems: What do industry practitioners need?
The potential for machine learning (ML) systems to amplify social inequities
and unfairness is receiving increasing popular and academic attention. A surge
of recent work has focused on the development of algorithmic tools to assess
and mitigate such unfairness. If these tools are to have a positive impact on
industry practice, however, it is crucial that their design be informed by an
understanding of real-world needs. Through 35 semi-structured interviews and an
anonymous survey of 267 ML practitioners, we conduct the first systematic
investigation of commercial product teams' challenges and needs for support in
developing fairer ML systems. We identify areas of alignment and disconnect
between the challenges faced by industry practitioners and solutions proposed
in the fair ML research literature. Based on these findings, we highlight
directions for future ML and HCI research that will better address industry
practitioners' needs.Comment: To appear in the 2019 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems (CHI 2019
Do Social Bots Dream of Electric Sheep? A Categorisation of Social Media Bot Accounts
So-called 'social bots' have garnered a lot of attention lately. Previous
research showed that they attempted to influence political events such as the
Brexit referendum and the US presidential elections. It remains, however,
somewhat unclear what exactly can be understood by the term 'social bot'. This
paper addresses the need to better understand the intentions of bots on social
media and to develop a shared understanding of how 'social' bots differ from
other types of bots. We thus describe a systematic review of publications that
researched bot accounts on social media. Based on the results of this
literature review, we propose a scheme for categorising bot accounts on social
media sites. Our scheme groups bot accounts by two dimensions - Imitation of
human behaviour and Intent.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the Australasian
Conference on Information Systems, 201
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