Big Data, Machine Learning, and the Social Sciences:,Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

by Hanna Wallach

This essay is a (near) transcript of a talk I recently gave at a NIPS 2014 workshop on “Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Machine Learning,” organized by Solon Barocas and Moritz Hardt.

Introduction

I want to start by giving you some context for this talk by telling you a little bit about me and my background: I’m a machine learning researcher by training. That said, I wouldn’t describe my research over the past few years as being traditional machine learning. Instead, most of my recent research has been in the emerging field of computational social science — that is, the development and use of computational and statistical techniques to study social processes. This shift in research direction has given me an opportunity to start thinking outside the algorithmic boxes typically embraced by the machine learning community and instead focus on the opportunities, challenges, and implications involved developing and using machine learning methods to analyze real-world data about society.

Outside of my research life, I’ve also spent the past 15 years contributing to the free and open source software community and working to promote and support women in computing. These activities, and their focus on transparency, openness, fairness, and inclusion, have influenced my perspective on the issues surrounding today’s workshop, and I’m excited to be speaking here because it’s given me an opportunity to tie together some of my thoughts on these ideas and their relationship to machine learning.

We have a really interesting group of people here today, with very diverse backgrounds, and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out of their interactions. As a result, this talk will be structured around four talking points — intended to prompt discussion — that lie at the heart of fairness, accountability, and transparency in machine learning:

    - Data
    - Questions
    - Models
    - Findings

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Continua qui: https://medium.com/@hannawallach/big-data-machine-learning-and-the-social-sciences-927a8e20460d