212 research outputs found
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
Ubiquitous Social Networks: Opportunities and Challenges for Privacy-Aware User Modelling
Privacy has been recognized as an important topic in the Internet for a long time, and technological developments in the area of privacy tools are ongoing. However, their focus was mainly on the individual. With the proliferation of social network sites, it has become more evident that the problem of privacy is not bounded by the perimeters of individuals but also by the privacy needs of their social networks. The objective of this paper is to contribute to the discussion about privacy in social network sites, a topic which we consider to be severely under-researched. We propose a framework for analyzing privacy requirements and for analyzing privacy-related data. We outline a combination of requirements analysis, conflict-resolution techniques, and a P3P extension that can contribute to privacy within such sites.World Wide Web, privacy, social network analysis, requirements analysis, privacy negotiation, ubiquity, P3P
FairDistillation: Mitigating Stereotyping in Language Models
Large pre-trained language models are successfully being used in a variety of
tasks, across many languages. With this ever-increasing usage, the risk of
harmful side effects also rises, for example by reproducing and reinforcing
stereotypes. However, detecting and mitigating these harms is difficult to do
in general and becomes computationally expensive when tackling multiple
languages or when considering different biases. To address this, we present
FairDistillation: a cross-lingual method based on knowledge distillation to
construct smaller language models while controlling for specific biases. We
found that our distillation method does not negatively affect the downstream
performance on most tasks and successfully mitigates stereotyping and
representational harms. We demonstrate that FairDistillation can create fairer
language models at a considerably lower cost than alternative approaches.Comment: Accepted at ECML-PKDD 202
Big data for monitoring educational systems
This report considers âhow advances in big data are likely to transform the context and methodology of monitoring educational systems within a long-term perspective (10-30 years) and impact the evidence based policy development in the sectorâ, big data are âlarge amounts of different types of data produced with high velocity from a high number of various types of sources.â Five independent experts were commissioned by Ecorys, responding to themes of: students' privacy, educational equity and efficiency, student tracking, assessment and skills. The experts were asked to consider the âmacro perspective on governance on educational systems at all levels from primary, secondary education and tertiary â the latter covering all aspects of tertiary from further, to higher, and to VETâ, prioritising primary and secondary levels of education
Ethical Adversaries: Towards Mitigating Unfairness with Adversarial Machine Learning
Machine learning is being integrated into a growing number of critical
systems with far-reaching impacts on society. Unexpected behaviour and unfair
decision processes are coming under increasing scrutiny due to this widespread
use and its theoretical considerations. Individuals, as well as organisations,
notice, test, and criticize unfair results to hold model designers and
deployers accountable. We offer a framework that assists these groups in
mitigating unfair representations stemming from the training datasets. Our
framework relies on two inter-operating adversaries to improve fairness. First,
a model is trained with the goal of preventing the guessing of protected
attributes' values while limiting utility losses. This first step optimizes the
model's parameters for fairness. Second, the framework leverages evasion
attacks from adversarial machine learning to generate new examples that will be
misclassified. These new examples are then used to retrain and improve the
model in the first step. These two steps are iteratively applied until a
significant improvement in fairness is obtained. We evaluated our framework on
well-studied datasets in the fairness literature -- including COMPAS -- where
it can surpass other approaches concerning demographic parity, equality of
opportunity and also the model's utility. We also illustrate our findings on
the subtle difficulties when mitigating unfairness and highlight how our
framework can assist model designers.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl
Shopping for privacy: Purchase details leaked to PayPal
status: publishe
A-posteriori provenance-enabled linking of publications and datasets via crowdsourcing
This paper aims to share with the digital library community different opportunities to leverage crowdsourcing for a-posteriori capturing of dataset citation graphs. We describe a practical approach, which exploits one possible crowdsourcing technique to collect these graphs from domain experts and proposes their publication as Linked Data using the W3C PROV standard. Based on our findings from a study we ran during the USEWOD 2014 workshop, we propose a semi-automatic approach that generates metadata by leveraging information extraction as an additional step to crowdsourcing, to generate high-quality data citation graphs. Furthermore, we consider the design implications on our crowdsourcing approach when non-expert participants are involved in the process<br/
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