Algorithms and Bias

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Q. and A. With Cynthia Dwork in the New York Times: “Algorithms have become one of the most powerful arbiters in our lives. They make decisions about the news we read, the jobs we get, the people we meet, the schools we attend and the ads we see.

Yet there is growing evidence that algorithms and other types of software can discriminate. The people who write them incorporate their biases, and algorithms often learn from human behavior, so they reflect the biases we hold. For instance, research has shown that ad-targeting algorithms have shown ads for high-paying jobs to men but not women, and ads for high-interest loans to people in low-income neighborhoods.

Cynthia Dwork, a computer scientist at Microsoft Research in Silicon Valley, is one of the leading thinkers on these issues. In an Upshot interview, which has been edited, she discussed how algorithms learn to discriminate, who’s responsible when they do, and the trade-offs between fairness and privacy.

Q: Some people have argued that algorithms eliminate discriminationbecause they make decisions based on data, free of human bias. Others say algorithms reflect and perpetuate human biases. What do you think?

A: Algorithms do not automatically eliminate bias. Suppose a university, with admission and rejection records dating back for decades and faced with growing numbers of applicants, decides to use a machine learning algorithm that, using the historical records, identifies candidates who are more likely to be admitted. Historical biases in the training data will be learned by the algorithm, and past discrimination will lead to future discrimination.

Q: Are there examples of that happening?

A: A famous example of a system that has wrestled with bias is the resident matching program that matches graduating medical students with residency programs at hospitals. The matching could be slanted to maximize the happiness of the residency programs, or to maximize the happiness of the medical students. Prior to 1997, the match was mostly about the happiness of the programs.

This changed in 1997 in response to “a crisis of confidence concerning whether the matching algorithm was unreasonably favorable to employers at the expense of applicants, and whether applicants could ‘game the system,’ ” according to a paper by Alvin Roth and Elliott Peranson published in The American Economic Review.

Q: You have studied both privacy and algorithm design, and co-wrote a paper, “Fairness Through Awareness,” that came to some surprising conclusions about discriminatory algorithms and people’s privacy. Could you summarize those?

A: “Fairness Through Awareness” makes the observation that sometimes, in order to be fair, it is important to make use of sensitive information while carrying out the classification task. This may be a little counterintuitive: The instinct might be to hide information that could be the basis of discrimination….

Q: The law protects certain groups from discrimination. Is it possible to teach an algorithm to do the same?

A: This is a relatively new problem area in computer science, and there are grounds for optimism — for example, resources from the Fairness, Accountability and Transparency in Machine Learning workshop, which considers the role that machines play in consequential decisions in areas like employment, health care and policing. This is an exciting and valuable area for research. …(More)”

Crowdfunding sites aim to make the law accessible to all

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jonathan Ford at the Financial Times: “Using the internet to harness the financial power of crowds is hardly novel. Almost since the first electronic impulse pinged its way across the world wide web, entrepreneurs have been dreaming up sites to facilitate everything from charitable donation to hard-nosed investment.

Peer-to-peer lending is now almost part of the mainstream. JustGiving, the charitable portal, has been going since 2000. But employing the web to raise money for legal actions remains a less well ploughed piece of virtual terrain.

At first glance, you might wonder why this is. There is already a booming offline trade in the commercial funding of litigation, especially in America and Britain, whether through lawyers’ no-win, no-fee arrangements or third party investment. And, indeed, a few pioneering crowdfunding vehicles have recently emerged in the US. One such is Invest4Justice, a site that boldly touts returns of “500 per cent plus in a few months”.

Whether these eye-catching figures are ultimately deliverable is — as lawyers like to say — moot. But there are risks in seeking to share the fruits of a third party’s action that can make it perilous for the crowdfunding investor. One is that when actions fail, those same backers might have to pay not only their own, but the successful party’s, costs….

But not all crowdfunding ventures seek to reward participants in the currency of cold financial return. Crowdjustice, Britain’s first legal crowdfunding website, seeks to scratch quite a different itch in the psyches of its participants….Among the causes it has taken up are a criminal appeal and a planning dispute in Lancashire involving a landfill site. The only real requirement for consideration is that the legal David confronting the corporate or governmental Goliath must have already engaged a lawyer to take on their case….This certainly means the risk of being dragged into proceedings is far lower. But it also raises a question: why would the public want to donate money to lawyers in the first place?

Ms Salasky thinks it ranges from a sense of justice to enlightened self-interest. “Donors can be people who take human rights seriously, but they could also be those who worry that something which is happening to someone else could also happen to them,” she says. It is one reason why perhaps the most potent application is seen to be in the fields of environmental and planning law. …(More)”

 

Beyond the Common Rule: Ethical Structures for Data Research in Non-Academic Settings

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Future of Privacy Forum: “In the wake of last year’s news about the Facebook “emotional contagion” study and subsequent public debate about the role of A/B Testing and ethical concerns around the use of Big Data, FPF Senior Fellow Omer Tene participated in a December symposum on corporate consumer research hosted by Silicon Flatirons. This past month, the Colorado Technology Law Journal published a series of papers that emerged out of the symposium, including “Beyond the Common Rule: Ethical Structures for Data Research in Non-Academic Settings.”

“Beyond the Common Rule,” by Jules Polonetsky, Omer Tene, and Joseph Jerome, continues the Future of Privacy Forum’s effort to build on the notion of consumer subject review boards first advocated by Ryan Calo at FPF’s 2013 Big Data symposium. It explores how researchers, increasingly in corporate settings, are analyzing data and testing theories using often sensitive personal information. Many of these new uses of PII are simply natural extensions of current practices, and are either within the expectations of individuals or the bounds of the FIPPs. Yet many of these projects could involve surprising applications or uses of data, exceeding user expectations, and offering notice and obtaining consent could may not be feasible.

This article expands on ideas and suggestions put forward around the recent discussion draft of the White House Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, which espouses “Privacy Review Boards” as a safety value for noncontextual data uses. It explores how existing institutional review boards within the academy and for human testing research could offer lessons for guiding principles, providing accountability and enhancing consumer trust, and offers suggestions for how companies — and researchers — can pursue both knowledge and data innovation responsibly and ethically….(More)”

Digital government evolution: From transformation to contextualization

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Tomasz Janowski in the Government Information Quarterly: “The Digital Government landscape is continuously changing to reflect how governments are trying to find innovative digital solutions to social, economic, political and other pressures, and how they transform themselves in the process. Understanding and predicting such changes is important for policymakers, government executives, researchers and all those who prepare, make, implement or evaluate Digital Government decisions. This article argues that the concept of Digital Government evolves toward more complexity and greater contextualization and specialization, similar to evolution-like processes that lead to changes in cultures and societies. To this end, the article presents a four-stage Digital Government Evolution Model comprising Digitization (Technology in Government), Transformation (Electronic Government), Engagement (Electronic Governance) and Contextualization (Policy-Driven Electronic Governance) stages; provides some evidence in support of this model drawing upon the study of the Digital Government literature published in Government Information Quarterly between 1992 and 2014; and presents a Digital Government Stage Analysis Framework to explain the evolution. As the article consolidates a representative body of the Digital Government literature, it could be also used for defining and integrating future research in the area….(More)”

We are data: the future of machine intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Douglas Coupland in the Financial Times: “…But what if the rise of Artificial Intuition instead blossoms under the aegis of theology or political ideology? With politics we can see an interesting scenario developing in Europe, where Google is by far the dominant search engine. What is interesting there is that people are perfectly free to use Yahoo or Bing yet they choose to stick with Google and then they get worried about Google having too much power — which is an unusual relationship dynamic, like an old married couple. Maybe Google could be carved up into baby Googles? But no. How do you break apart a search engine? AT&T was broken into seven more or less regional entities in 1982 but you can’t really do that with a search engine. Germany gets gaming? France gets porn? Holland gets commerce? It’s not a pie that can be sliced.

The time to fix this data search inequity isn’t right now, either. The time to fix this problem was 20 years ago, and the only country that got it right was China, which now has its own search engine and social networking systems. But were the British or Spanish governments — or any other government — to say, “OK, we’re making our own proprietary national search engine”, that would somehow be far scarier than having a private company running things. (If you want paranoia, let your government control what you can and can’t access — which is what you basically have in China. Irony!)

The tendency in theocracies would almost invariably be one of intense censorship, extreme limitations of access, as well as machine intelligence endlessly scouring its system in search of apostasy and dissent. The Americans, on the other hand, are desperately trying to implement a two-tiered system to monetise information in the same way they’ve monetised medicine, agriculture, food and criminality. One almost gets misty-eyed looking at North Koreans who, if nothing else, have yet to have their neurons reconfigured, thus turning them into a nation of click junkies. But even if they did have an internet, it would have only one site to visit, and its name would be gloriousleader.nk.

. . .

To summarise. Everyone, basically, wants access to and control over what you will become, both as a physical and metadata entity. We are also on our way to a world of concrete walls surrounding any number of niche beliefs. On our journey, we get to watch machine intelligence become profoundly more intelligent while, as a society, we get to watch one labour category after another be systematically burped out of the labour pool. (Doug’s Law: An app is only successful if it puts a lot of people out of work.)…(More)”

How Collaboration and Crowdsourcing are Changing Legal Research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Susan Martin at Legal Current/ThomsonReuters: “Bob Ambrogi, lawyer, consultant and blogger at Law Sites, spoke at a well-attended session this morning at the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Annual Meeting. Titled “Playing Well With Others: How Collaboration and Crowdsourcing are Changing Legal Research,” Ambrogi’s presentation began with a light-hearted scolding of lawyers and legal professionals who simply “aren’t very good at sharing.”

“Crowdsourcing requires sharing and lawyers tend to be very possessive, so that makes it difficult,” said Ambrogi….

Why would a legal researcher want to do this? To establish credibility, according to Ambrogi. “Blogging is another way of doing this. It’s a good example of pulling together all the commentary out there so it lives in one place,” he said. “The more we can tap into the collective knowledge out there and use professionals to share their own legal materials in one central space…that’s a real benefit.”

Ambrogi then shared some examples of crowdsourcing gone wrong, where sites were built and abandoned or simply not updated enough to be effective. Examples include Spindle Law, Jurify and Standardforms.org.

He then went on to showcase three examples of great crowdsourced sites:

So how can lawyers learn to play well with others? Ambrogi offered the following tips, in closing:

  1. Make it easy to contribute
  2. Make it rewarding to contribute
  3. Make the content useful to others
  4. Success will breed success. (More)”

The Art of Changing a City

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Antanas Mockus in the New York Times: “Between 1995 and 2003, I served two terms as mayor of Bogotá. Like most cities in the world, Colombia’s capital had a great many problems that needed fixing and few people believed they could be fixed.

As a professor of philosophy, I had little patience with conventional wisdom. When I was threatened by the leftist guerrilla group known as FARC, as hundreds of Colombian mayors were, I decided to wear a bulletproof vest. But mine had a hole cut in the shape of a heart over my chest. I wore that symbol of confidence, or defiance, for nine months.

Here’s what I learned: People respond to humor and playfulness from politicians. It’s the most powerful tool for change we have.

Bogotá’s traffic was chaotic and dangerous when I came to office. We decided the city needed a radical new approach to traffic safety. Among various strategies, we printed and distributed hundreds of thousands of “citizens’ cards,” which had a thumbs-up image on one side to flash at courteous drivers, and a thumbs-down on the other to express disapproval. Within a decade, traffic fatalities fell by more than half.

Another initiative in a small area of the city was to replace corrupt traffic police officers with mime artists. The idea was that instead of cops handing out tickets and pocketing fines, these performers would “police” drivers’ behavior by communicating with mime — for instance, pretending to be hurt or offended when a vehicle ignored the pedestrian right of way in a crosswalk. Could this system, which boiled down to publicly signaled approval or disapproval, really work?

We had plenty of skeptics. At a news conference, a journalist asked, “Can the mimes serve traffic fines?” That is legally impermissible, I answered. “Then it won’t work,” he declared.

But change is possible. People began to obey traffic signals and, for the first time, they respected crosswalks. Within months, I was able to dissolve the old, corrupt transit police force of about 1,800 officers, arranging with the national police service to replace them.

….

This illustrates another lesson we learned. It helps to develop short, pleasing experiences for people that generate stories of delightful surprise, moments of mutual admiration among citizens and the welcome challenge of understanding something new. But then you need to consolidate those stories with good statistical results obtained through cold, rational measurement. That creates a virtuous cycle, so that congenial new experiences lead to statistically documented improvements, and the documentation raises expectations for more welcome change.

The art of politics is a curious business. It combines, as no other profession or occupation does, rigorous reasoning, sincere emotions and extroverted body language, with what are sometimes painfully cold, slow and planned strategic interactions. It is about leading, but not directing: What people love most is when you write on the blackboard a risky first half of a sentence and then recognize their freedom to write the other half.

My main theoretical and practical concern has been how to use the force of social and moral regulation to obtain the rule of law. This entailed a fundamental respect for human lives, expressed in the dictum “Life is sacred.” My purpose was to create a cosmopolitan culture of citizenship in which expressions like “crimes against humanity” would find a precise operational meaning….(More)”

‘Smart Cities’ Will Know Everything About You

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mike Weston in the Wall Street Journal: “From Boston to Beijing, municipalities and governments across the world are pledging billions to create “smart cities”—urban areas covered with Internet-connected devices that control citywide systems, such as transit, and collect data. Although the details can vary, the basic goal is to create super-efficient infrastructure, aid urban planning and improve the well-being of the populace.

A byproduct of a tech utopia will be a prodigious amount of data collected on the inhabitants. For instance, at the company I head, we recently undertook an experiment in which some staff volunteered to wear devices around the clock for 10 days. We monitored more than 170 metrics reflecting their daily habits and preferences—including how they slept, where they traveled and how they felt (a fast heart rate and no movement can indicate excitement or stress).

If the Internet age has taught us anything, it’s that where there is information, there is money to be made. With so much personal information available and countless ways to use it, businesses and authorities will be faced with a number of ethical questions.

In a fully “smart” city, every movement an individual makes can be tracked. The data will reveal where she works, how she commutes, her shopping habits, places she visits and her proximity to other people. You could argue that this sort of tracking already exists via various apps and on social-media platforms, or is held by public-transport companies and e-commerce sites. The difference is that with a smart city this data will be centralized and easy to access. Given the value of this data, it’s conceivable that municipalities or private businesses that pay to create a smart city will seek to recoup their expenses by selling it….

Recent history—issues of privacy and security on social networks and chatting apps, and questions about how intellectual-property regulations apply online—has shown that the law has been slow to catch up with digital innovations. So businesses that can purchase smart-city data will be presented with many strategic and ethical concerns.

What degree of targeting is too specific and violates privacy? Should businesses limit the types of goods or services they offer to certain individuals? Is it ethical for data—on an employee’s eating habits, for instance—to be sold to employers or to insurance companies to help them assess claims? Do individuals own their own personal data once it enters the smart-city system?

With or without stringent controlling legislation, businesses in a smart city will need to craft their own policies and procedures regarding the use of data. A large-scale misuse of personal data could provoke a consumer backlash that could cripple a company’s reputation and lead to monster lawsuits. An additional problem is that businesses won’t know which individuals might welcome the convenience of targeted advertising and which will find it creepy—although data science could solve this equation eventually by predicting where each individual’s privacy line is.

A smart city doesn’t have to be as Orwellian as it sounds. If businesses act responsibly, there is no reason why what sounds intrusive in the abstract can’t revolutionize the way people live for the better by offering services that anticipates their needs; by designing ultraefficient infrastructure that makes commuting a (relative) dream; or with a revolutionary approach to how energy is generated and used by businesses and the populace at large….(More)”

White House to make public records more public

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Lisa Rein at the Washington Post: “The law that’s supposed to keep citizens in the know about what their government is doing is about to get more robust.

Starting this week, seven agencies — including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence —  launched a new effort to put online the records they distribute to requesters under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

So if a journalist, nonprofit group or corporation asks for the records, what they see, the public also will see. Documents still will be redacted where necessary to protect what the government decides is sensitive information, an area that’s often disputed but won’t change with this policy.

The Obama administration’s new Open Government initiative began quietly on the agencies’ Web sites days after FOIA’s 49th anniversary. It’s a response to years of pressure from open-government groups and lawmakers to boost public access to records of government decisions, deliberations and policies.

The “release to one is release to all” policy will start as a six-month pilot at the EPA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Millennium Challenge Corporation and within some offices at the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Department, the Justice Department and the National Archives and Records Administration….(More)”

The case for data ethics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Steven Tiell at Accenture: “Personal data is the coin of the digital realm, which for business leaders creates a critical dilemma. Companies are being asked to gather more types of data faster than ever to maintain a competitive edge in the digital marketplace; at the same time, however, they are being asked to provide pervasive and granular control mechanisms over the use of that data throughout the data supply chain.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. If organizations, or the platforms they use to deliver services, fail to secure personal data, they expose themselves to tremendous risk—from eroding brand value and the hard-won trust of established vendors and customers to ceding market share, from violating laws to costing top executives their jobs.

To distinguish their businesses in this marketplace, leaders should be asking themselves two questions. What are the appropriate standards and practices our company needs to have in place to govern the handling of data? And how can our company make strong data controls a value proposition for our employees, customers and partners?

Defining effective compliance activities to support legal and regulatory obligations can be a starting point. However, mere compliance with existing regulations—which are, for the most part, focused on privacy—is insufficient. Respect for privacy is a byproduct of high ethical standards, but it is only part of the picture. Companies need to embrace data ethics, an expansive set of practices and behaviors grounded in a moral framework for the betterment of a community (however defined).

 RAISING THE BAR

Why ethics? When communities of people—in this case, the business community at large—encounter new influences, the way they respond to and engage with those influences becomes the community’s shared ethics. Individuals who behave in accordance with these community norms are said to be moral, and those who are exemplary are able to gain the trust of their community.

Over time, as ethical standards within a community shift, the bar for trustworthiness is raised on the assumption that participants in civil society must, at a minimum, adhere to the rule of law. And thus, to maintain moral authority and a high degree of trust, actors in a community must constantly evolve to adopt the highest ethical standards.

Actors in the big data community, where security and privacy are at the core of relationships with stakeholders, must adhere to a high ethical standard to gain this trust. This requires them to go beyond privacy law and existing data control measures. It will also reward those who practice strong ethical behaviors and a high degree of transparency at every stage of the data supply chain. The most successful actors will become the platform-based trust authorities, and others will depend on these platforms for disclosure, sharing and analytics of big data assets.

Data ethics becomes a value proposition only once controls and capabilities are in place to granularly manage data assets at scale throughout the data supply chain. It is also beneficial when a community shares the same behavioral norms and taxonomy to describe the data itself, the ethical decision points along the data supply chain, and how those decisions lead to beneficial or harmful impacts….(More)”