Beyond Bias

On March 17, at 2-3pm Mountain Time (21:00 GMT), Alex Hanna is scheduled to speak as part of the B2C2 series. Dr. Hanna is part of the Ethical AI Team at Google. Her talk is entitled “Beyond Bias: Algorithmic Unfairness, Infrastructure, and Genealogies of Data.”

Problems of algorithmic bias are often framed in terms of lack of representative data or formal fairness optimization constraints to be applied to automated decision-making systems. However, these discussions sidestep deeper issues with data used in AI, including problematic categorizations and the extractive logics of crowdwork and data mining. In this talk, Dr. Hanna makes two interventions: first by reframing of data as a form of infrastructure, and as such, implicating politics and power in the construction of datasets; and secondly discussing the development of a research program around the genealogy of datasets used in machine learning and AI systems. These genealogies should be attentive to the constellation of organizations and stakeholders involved in their creation, the intent, values, and assumptions of their authors and curators, and the adoption of datasets by subsequent researchers.

Registration for the free online event is open to the public and may be found here.