This event is part of the AI for Social Impact Seminar Series hosted by Penn State's Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence.
"Responsible AI: Thinking Beyond Data and Models"
The last decade has seen tremendous growth in artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and its wide-spread adoption in society. Given the impact they have on our social lives, there have also been research on the fairness, accountability, and ethical values that underlie these technologies. While this line of research has gotten great attention in recent years, a majority of this work focuses primarily on mathematical interventions on the often opaque algorithms or models and/or their immediate inputs (data) and outputs (predictions). Such oversimplified mathematical interventions abstract away the underlying societal context where models are conceived, developed, and ultimately deployed. In this talk, I will discuss two strands of my recent work attempting to look beyond the data and models. First, I will discuss a complex systems theory based approach towards modeling societal context that accounts for its dynamic nature, including delayed impacts and feedback loops, and how to bring the expertise from marginalized communities into that process. Second, I discuss how the current literature on algorithmic fairness is rooted in Western concerns, histories, and values, and how this limits its portability to other geographies and cultures, especially in the Global South. In particular, I will discuss our recent work on re-imagining algorithmic fairness for the Indian context.
About the Speaker
Vinodkumar Prabhakaran is a Research Scientist at Google working on issues around ethics, fairness, and transparency in machine learning and natural language processing. Prior to Google, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, and obtained his PhD in computer science from Columbia University. His prior research focused on building scalable ways to identify and address large-scale societal issues such as racial disparities in policing, workplace incivility, and online abuse. His work has been published in top-tier venues such as PNAS, ACL, NAACL, and EMNLP. He co-organizes the annual international workshop on online abuse and harms (WOAH), and served as a Diversity and Inclusion co-chair for ACL 2020.