Race, Technology, and Algorithmic Bias | Vision & Justice || Radcliffe Institute

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- Joy. Latanya. - Darren. - What a joyous occasion this is to have this black girl magic, this brilliance, enveloped in this room. Dr. Latanya Sweeney wouldn't tell you this about herself, because she's a woman of great modesty, the first African American woman to receive a PhD in computer science at MIT. [APPLAUSE] - Joy Buolamwini would not tell you that the PhD in computer science that she will shortly receive is an additional credential stacked on top of that Rhodes scholarship and the room full of credentials that reflect the ways in which excellence is personified in our community. Both of you are pioneers in a space where women like you are often invisible, are not present in the room. And yet you have demanded that the doors be open. And you are giving insight and shedding light on the pernicious affects of something most of us believe to be simply unbiased. I mean, how could AI-- the promise of AI, is that at last we can have objective measurements, evaluation, systems that move us from the injustice in the analog world to justice in the digital world. So can we have justice in this new digital world? Latanya, when you came to the Ford Foundation and blew the roof off of the building with the presentation you did, demonstrating how the effects of racism manifest in simple exercises of aggregating names, could you tell us a little bit about how we see that manifest on the sure? - Sure. Actually, that story started with when I had first arrived here at Harvard, and I was being interviewed by a reporter. And the reporter wanted to see an article I had written. So I go, and I typed my name into Google. And up popped the link to the paper, but also some ads that implied I had an arrest record. And the reporter said, forget the ad. Forget the article. Tell me about the time you were arrested. And I said, well, I wasn't arrested. And he says, then why does your computer say you were? And so we go back and forth for a little bit. And I click on the link into paying the fee all just to show that the company, one, had no arrest record for anyone named Latanya Sweeney. But that started me taking two months, typing in the names of real people, trying to understand how this came to be. And I did hundreds of thousands of searches across the United States and learned that the company had actually put down ads on the names of all real Americans or real adults, rather, who they believed lived in the United States. But if your name was given more often to a black baby than a white baby, an ad would pop up implying you had an arrest record. But if your name was given more often to white babies, it didn't. And the difference was huge. It was like 80% to 20% difference. And discrimination in the United States isn't illegal we but we do have protected groups and in certain situations. And one of those groups were blacks. And one of those situations is employment. And the argument that I made was that when you apply for a job, someone will look online to see what information is about you. And this put African American and black applicants at a tremendous disadvantage. Because right away the computer was sort of implying something about them that often wasn't true. That turned out to be exactly what was needed to open, in the Department of Justice, a civil rights investigation. I'm a computer scientist by training. And it was the first time any of us thought in terms of, oh my gosh, this computer is racist. [LAUGHTER] And why how did this come to be? And so that was sort of the start of a real awakening that now we see it engaged in so many ways, that the pursuit of technology is not exempt from these same ills that we find in other parts of our society and maybe even be more potent today. - But before you, this had not happened. So why didn't some white guy computer scientist figure this out? - Well, first of all, if he was searching for his name, he would have gotten a nice neutral ad. So he may not have been sparked by it. So this speaks directly to the idea of me being who I am in that situation and having one of those black sounding first names. - And so what can we extrapolate from this? Because I know that some of the work that you have continued to do has looked at the predictive analytics that are being used around which major decisions are being made that impact people's lives far beyond employment. - Yeah. I took time off from Harvard to be the chief technology officer at the Federal Trade Commission. And one of the things that became very clear is how technology was allowing the very specific types of fraud, very specific ways to disenfranchise people to really exist. And that was everything from, if you're on the internet-- so for most households in the United States, everyone's most frequently visited websites are the same first 10. But after number 10, they deviate greatly specifically based on whether or not you have a child, your income, your education level, your race, and your interest. And the more you get into a community that you feel is more like you, the more you trust. And those are the places where huge frauds happen. And so that was kind of this interesting relationship we began to learn over and over again at the FTC around how people trust their social networks and so forth and the internet and how they can be manipulated against them. That became part of, when I came back to Harvard, our investigations with students. I teach a class here called Tech Science To Save the World. And we began looking through 2016. How would old ways in which people were disenfranchised from voting show up in technology? And the work showed many discoveries. But one of them was we were the first to show those 36 voter registration websites and their vulnerabilities. And this year we taught the class. And we were able to point out a vulnerability in the 2020 census that will go online. These things matter, because they're subtle in the sense that, if somebody disenfranchises you to vote online, you still show up at the polling place, except you're not in the poll book. So they give you a provisional ballot. So you think you voted, but in many states the vote doesn't count. Or in the census, a miscount determines the amount of representatives we have in the House of Representatives, and therefore can tilt the balance of republicans and democrats. So these things, in some ways, tend to be small, but the manifestations of them are huge. - So Joy, you have started an organization called the Algorithmic Justice League, a new civil rights organization for the 21st century. And you have also brought Amazon, IBM to their knees. [LAUGHTER] I mean, it is you who shamed them on the front pages of The New York Times and in media by calling them out, by calling them out on the ways in which they were making millions of dollars selling facial recognition programs and other products that were actually flawed. And your research demonstrated that they were flawed. But they didn't want to hear that from you it sounds like. - Well, with the Algorithmic Justice League, I started it because I was working on an art project that went awry. And so I'm sure everybody in this audience has heard of the white gaze, the male gaze. Well, to that I add the coded gaze. And the coded gaze that is a reflection of the priorities, preferences, and also prejudices of those who have the power to shape technology. So I was working on an art project that used face detection. So when I looked at a mirror, it would say, hello, beautiful. Or it would put a lion on my face, so I could become Serena Williams just for fun. I'm at the Media Lab. We do these kinds of explorations. [LAUGHTER] So as I was working on this project in a class called Science Fabrication, which is about visioning what might be and trying to see if you can manifest it now, I noticed there was a problem. The face detection software I was using, it worked fine for my friend's face. But when it came to my face, I ran into a little problem. [LAUGHTER] But I got an assist, right, so literally coding in a white mask. I mean, [INAUDIBLE] already said it, but I didn't think it would be so literal when it happened. [LAUGHTER] And so I had the opportunity to share this on the TED platform. And in that talk, this is when I talked about launching the Algorithmic Justice League. Because I'm thinking, well, if they can't get our faces right, what else could be going wrong? And I also noticed I had something in common with the women of Wakanda. And so when the Black Panther came out, I decided to run their faces. They were either not detected, some of them were misgendered. But then I decided to test out age classification, age estimation. So those red columns you're seeing are under the age header. It's verified, black don't crack. We see it here. [APPLAUSE] But it really became more serious in terms of thinking towards justice when I read a report from Georgetown Law showing 1 in 2 adults, over 130 million people, has their face and a face recognition network that can be searched by law enforcement unwarranted using technology that hasn't been audited for accuracy. This is one of the reasons why we audited Amazon, because they're selling to law enforcement right now. They're trialing this technology with the FBI. Now, some people are also saying, look, not being detected, that's not the worst thing, right? Maybe we got a windfall. But for me it wasn't not being detected. But what happens when you're misidentified? So in the UK, where they've actually done performance metrics, they showed that they had false positive match rates of over 90%, more than 2,400 innocent people being falsely matched and even cases of women being matched with men. Last week, an African American teenager is suing Apple for $1 billion, because he's been misidentified through some of the facial analysis recognition technology that's out there. So because this technology is actually in the real world and can change people's lives in a material way, that's why I started the Algorithmic Justice League. And that's why I've been challenging large tech companies. - And recent research, which we were emailing about a couple of weeks ago, truly bowled me over. So talk about the results of the research around autonomous vehicles and people of color. - Oh. So-- [LAUGHTER] --you probably know where this goes. Let me back up really quickly. So my MIT research was called Gender Shades. And what I did along with Dr. Timnit Gebru-- and you see us posing for Bloomberg 50 right there, looking fierce with our co-founder of Black in AI. What we were showing was that if you looked at skin type as a way of evaluating facial analysis technology, you would find different kinds of disparities than if you just looked at race. So other researchers took that idea and said, OK, let's apply it to self-driving cars. And let's look at pedestrian tracking technology. So using the similar kind of methodology that was developed in Gender Shades, they tested it on the cars. Turns out they're less accurate for darker skinned individuals when it comes to tracking. So the promises of self-driving cars, autonomous vehicles, literally not being seen has real world consequences. [LAUGHTER] - So like-- wait. So let's just be really clear. So in this new digital world, if you are black, you are more likely to be run over by the autonomous vehicle? - We got to be careful-- [LAUGHTER] --extra careful. So that's why going white face sometimes, just so that-- [LAUGHTER] [INAUDIBLE] - But that's the irony is that in this new digital world we may literally have to wear white face. - Yeah. That is the new irony, sadly. - Well, I would like to say I do think computer science can do better. [LAUGHTER] - Says the PhD from MIT. So tell us how we make that happen, Dr. Sweeney. - So, look, technology design is really sort of the new policymaker. And these decisions it's really a reflection of people building technology in their own image. AI has always been this idea of building machines in your likeness. And when as they're building AI, what is like them is being over-fitted to the fact that they're often white men in their 20s. - And this is something I call the problem of pale male data sets. [LAUGHTER] - Pale male data sets. - Pale, male, and sometimes stale, but often male data sets. [LAUGHTER] OK. So when I was doing the research for Gender Shades, I started looking at all of these data sets of faces. And I looked at data sets that were used as gold standards. And what came up time and time again was the overrepresentation of lighter skinned individuals, the overrepresentation of men and the underrepresentation of women, and especially women of color. So if you're thinking about AI and machine learning as one of the ascendant approaches, machines are learning from what? Data. So in this case, data is destiny. And if we have pale male data sets, we're destined to fail the rest of society, whether it's on our streets because we can't detect different kinds of individuals, whether it's in a health care setting where people are trying to detect things like melanoma, or see if you can infer things like early signs of dementia. So the lack of representation I call this power shadows that end up in our data sets and our evaluation benchmarks as well. - So Latanya, you were the CTO at the FTC. What does government need to do about this? Is there a role for government in this? I mean, in the old analog world, we had a Civil Right's Act. We had the EEOC. We had a regulatory regime that protected the public interest. We have yet to define what the public interest is in this new digital world. - Well, a lot of the work that we do, I take the fact that people fought very hard-- and we saw a lot of that in the scenes that was shown earlier-- for the rights and the regulations that we have now. As technology rolls out, it dictates how we are going to live our lives by what technology allows us to do or doesn't allow us to do. And what people don't seem to realize is that every democratic value is up for grabs by what technology allows or doesn't allow. And so it's been incredibly important to be able to produce technologists sort of in the public interest, a group of technologists who are interested in understanding how to find these unforeseen consequences to shore up journalism, to shore up our regulators, and just help us really apply the laws and regulations we have to technology and also to help technologists do their job better. For many people in high tech, I don't think this was ever intended. For many of them, it really is an unintended consequence. So there's also a call or a need for technologists to do their job better in the high tech companies as well. - But we know that, for example, one of the reasons I've come to know you is because at the Ford Foundation we have been working on this new field of public interest technology. Because just as there needed to be a field created of public interest law in the 1960s, we need to think about what the public interest is in this new digital world. And in fact, it's the private sector who has determined the bounds of what is public and private. And we saw in the Zuckerberg hearings where we witnessed I think the interaction of capitalism and democracy, and democracy lost. - Yeah. - Because there was no one sitting behind those Congress people passing them notes, giving them questions to interrogate the tech executives. Because most of the capacity in this base is in the private sector. And so one of the things we have to think about is how do we train a generation of public interest technologists, like yourselves, who are going to fight the fight for justice in this new digital world? So, Joy, from your standpoint, what's needed most at this time to protect the public interest? - It's a big question. And it's not just one thing. I still believe that, as we're talking about public interest technologist and as we're thinking about how computer scientists how policy makers can shape the future, we have to also remind ourselves the importance of the artist and the storytellers. So the work that I've done thus far I really believe that part of the reason it's gained attention is because of that visual of coding in a white mask. There were FBI experts who did a facial analysis test before, but they didn't take the approach of calling out. I also think that how we're trained as computer scientists has to change, so that there is a sense of responsibility. We had a doctor up here earlier who was very courageous in standing up for Flint saying, we take an oath. We don't do that as computer sciences. We think we can create the world, we can break things. And until it's actually confronted, we don't actually have to make any changes. And so I think changing how we learn to be computer scientists will be a huge part of it, but not thinking that computer scientists or technologists can solve it alone. - So you see the role of the arts and humanities. So do you see a new curricular being needed, President Bacow, here and at other places? - Absolutely. And I'd like to talk about how, let's say, looking at the social sciences influenced my own work. So with Gender Shades, we went through. We made a new data set, et cetera, and so forth. And what we were able to show is that the current way we're taught thinking about the curriculum is to look at data and information in aggregate. And so if you see the aggregate performance for some of these companies, it seemed OK. So then we said, let's break it down. And let's look at what the implications are for gender. And we see gaps. Let's look at what the implications are for skin type. And we see gaps. But what I was able to do was then bring in Kimberlé Crenshaw and say, there's something we can learn as computer scientists from what she did with anti-discrimination law, saying that single access analysis is not enough. And so what happens when you marry that with computer vision? Well, this is what we got. We provided a new kind of perspective of looking at the data. And here we see that for one group, the pale males, you have 100% performance. And then for another group, women of color, right, you have the worst performance. And when we disaggregate that, we got to error rates as high as 47%. So as a computer scientist sitting in my body as somebody who is also reading Crenshaw, I'm able to then provide new insights into what we're doing with computer vision and computer science. [APPLAUSE] - Dr. Sweeney, are you encouraged by what you are seeing in the classroom here at Harvard? - Oh, my gosh. So the Save the World Class-- you know, students want to do good. And they want the work that they do to really matter and change the world. And the class has really touched the lives of a lot of the students. They've gone out. They've done amazing things. They've gotten Facebook to fix bugs. They've gotten Airbnb to address price discrimination. They were the first to point out problems in the Affordable Care Act. I mean, the list of accomplishments that these students have done goes on and on and on. And we do have to thank the Ford Foundation, too. Because the Ford Foundation has given us the funds to allow the students to explore these unforeseen consequences wherever they may be. And the students, they literally mean save the world. And it's been phenomenal. It's made a big difference. I just want to say also that the space of problems are huge, so from algorithms being used not just in our homes, but also determining what you're going to see on your social media feed to also determining sentencing and recommendations for around recidivism, all of which show unfairness and bias in them. And so the amount of work is huge. So some of it is a matter of shoring up and giving knowledge to those who have the power to help us make the change. - And Joy, final word, what do you have to say to this audience of people who are assembled here, because we care about justice in America and in the world? And we don't all understand this new technology. In fact, it's a little frightening to some of us. Should we be frightened? - We shouldn't be working together so there's less to fear. And I hope that all of you will join me in moving towards algorithmic justice, because we've entered the age of automation overconfident and underprepared. You see in this chart behind me all of the areas in which automated decision making is starting to enter our lives. So it's up to us, we who are here and also in the live stream, to be asking questions. If you're going for a job interview and they're using AI to make a determination, ask what's going on. Also, share your stories. We have Bias in the Wild reports that are submitted to the Algorithmic Justice League where people are like, my Snapchat [INAUDIBLE],, whatever it might be, you know? [LAUGHTER] So I think it's really important that people feel they have a voice and you don't feel like, oh, if I'm not a technologist, if I don't have PhDs from MIT, I can't be part of this conversation. But that's not true. We need to move towards participatory AI where those who are at the margins are actually centered when it comes to decision making around the technology that's shaping our lives and shaping society. - Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for a Latanya Sweeney and Joy Buolamwini. [APPLAUSE] - And Darren. - And Darren. [APPLAUSE]
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Channel: Harvard University
Views: 4,685
Rating: 4.4244604 out of 5
Keywords: Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, vision and justice, art, race, artificial intelligence, technology, algorithmic bias, Algorithmic Justice League
Id: Y6fUc5_whX8
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Length: 27min 0sec (1620 seconds)
Published: Tue May 07 2019
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