Towards a Standard for Identifying and Managing Bias in Artificial Intelligence


NIST Report: “As individuals and communities interact in and with an environment that is increasingly virtual they are often vulnerable to the commodification of their digital exhaust. Concepts and behavior that are ambiguous in nature are captured in this environment, quantified, and used to categorize, sort, recommend, or make decisions about people’s lives. While many organizations seek to utilize this information in a responsible manner, biases remain endemic across technology processes and can lead to harmful impacts regardless of intent. These harmful outcomes, even if inadvertent, create significant challenges for cultivating public trust in artificial intelligence (AI)….(More)” ... (More >)

Publicizing Corporate Secrets for Public Good


Paper by Christopher Morten: “Federal regulatory agencies in the United States hold a treasure trove of valuable information essential to a functional society. Yet little of this immense and nominally “public” resource is accessible to the public. That worrying phenomenon is particularly true for the valuable information that agencies hold on powerful private actors. Corporations regularly shield vast swaths of the information they share with federal regulatory agencies from public view, claiming that the information contains legally protected trade secrets (or other proprietary “confidential commercial information”). Federal agencies themselves have largely acceded to these claims and even fueled them,... (More >)

Holding Out for Something Better


Essay by Rebecca Williams on the “Limits of Customer Service and Administrative Burden Frameworks” : “On December 13th, the Biden Administration published an Executive Order on Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government. The EO promises to improve a slew of government services with the help of technology and rests on a theory of change that these “customer service” improvements will “engender trust,” but does not speak to changing the substance of these public goods, which may be the primary cause of the public’s trust issues, only their delivery. While the EO harkens to... (More >)

Privacy As/And Civil Rights


Paper by Tiffany C. Li: “Decades have passed since the modern American civil rights movement began, but the fight for equality is far from over. Systemic racism, sexism, and discrimination against many marginalized groups is still rampant in our society. Tensions rose to a fever pitch in 2020, with a summer of Black Lives Matters protests, sparked by the police killing of George Floyd, leading in to an attempted armed insurrection and attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Asian-Americans faced rising rates of racism and hate crimes , spurred in part by inflammatory statements from the... (More >)

Executive Order on Ensuring Responsible Innovation in Digital Assets


Factsheet from The White House: “Digital assets, including cryptocurrencies, have seen explosive growth in recent years, surpassing a $3 trillion market cap last November and up from $14 billion just five years prior. Surveys suggest that around 16 percent of adult Americans – approximately 40 million people – have invested in, traded, or used cryptocurrencies. Over 100 countries are exploring or piloting Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), a digital form of a country’s sovereign currency.The rise in digital assets creates an opportunity to reinforce American leadership in the global financial system and at the technological frontier, but also has... (More >)

Letters and cards telling people about local police reduce crime


Article by Elicia John & Shawn D. Bushway: “Community policing is often held up as an instrumental part of reforms to make policing less harmful, particularly in low-income communities that have high rates of violence. But building collaborative relationships between communities and police is hard. Writing in Nature, Shah and LaForest describe a large field experiment revealing that giving residents cards and letters with basic information about local police officers can prevent crime. Combining these results with those from Internet-based experiments, the authors attribute the observed reduction in crime to perceived ‘information symmetry’. Known strangers are individuals whom we’ve... (More >)

The Immaculate Conception of Data: Agribusiness, Activists, and Their Shared Politics of the Future


Book by Kelly Bronson: “Every new tractor now contains built-in sensors that collect data and stream it to cloud-based infrastructure. Seed and chemical companies are using these data, and these agribusinesses are a form of big tech alongside firms like Google and Facebook. The Immaculate Conception of Data peeks behind the secretive legal agreements surrounding agricultural big data to trace how it is used and with what consequences. Agribusinesses are among the oldest oligopoly corporations in the world, and their concentration gives them an advantage over other food system actors. Kelly Bronson explores what happens when big data get... (More >)

Where Do My Tax Dollars Go? Tax Morale Effects of Perceived Government Spending


Paper by Matias Giaccobasso, Brad C. Nathan, Ricardo Perez-Truglia & Alejandro Zentner: “Do perceptions about how the government spends tax dollars affect the willingness to pay taxes? We designed a field experiment to test this hypothesis in a natural, high-stakes context and via revealed preferences. We measure perceptions about the share of property tax revenues that fund public schools and the share of property taxes that are redistributed to disadvantaged districts. We find that even though information on where tax dollars go is publicly available and easily accessible, taxpayers still have significant misperceptions. We use an information-provision experiment to... (More >)

NIH issues a seismic mandate: share data publicly


Max Kozlov at Nature: “In January 2023, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will begin requiring most of the 300,000 researchers and 2,500 institutions it funds annually to include a data-management plan in their grant applications — and to eventually make their data publicly available. Researchers who spoke to Nature largely applaud the open-science principles underlying the policy — and the global example it sets. But some have concerns about the logistical challenges that researchers and their institutions will face in complying with it. Namely, they worry that the policy might exacerbate existing inequities in the science-funding landscape... (More >)

Turning the Principle of Participation into Practice: Empowering Parents to Engage on Data and Tech


Guest Blog by Elizabeth Laird at Responsible Data for Children: “Two years into the pandemic, questions about parental rights in school have taken center stage in public debates, particularly in school board meetings and state houses across the United States. Not surprisingly, this extends to the use of data and technology in schools. CDT recently released research that found that parental concerns around student privacy and security protection have risen since the spring, growing from 60% in February 2021 to 69% in July 2021. Far from being ambivalent, we also found that parents and students expressed eagerness to play... (More >)