When Do We Trust AI’s Recommendations More Than People’s?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chiara Longoni and Luca Cian at Harvard Business School: “More and more companies are leveraging technological advances in machine learning, natural language processing, and other forms of artificial intelligence to provide relevant and instant recommendations to consumers. From Amazon to Netflix to REX Real Estate, firms are using AI recommenders to enhance the customer experience. AI recommenders are also increasingly used in the public sector to guide people to essential services. For example, the New York City Department of Social Services uses AI to give citizens recommendations on disability benefits, food assistance, and health insurance.

However, simply offering AI assistance won’t necessarily lead to more successful transactions. In fact, there are cases when AI’s suggestions and recommendations are helpful and cases when they might be detrimental. When do consumers trust the word of a machine, and when do they resist it? Our research suggests that the key factor is whether consumers are focused on the functional and practical aspects of a product (its utilitarian value) or focused on the experiential and sensory aspects of a product (its hedonic value).

In an article in the Journal of Marketing — based on data from over 3,000 people who took part in 10 experiments — we provide evidence supporting for what we call a word-of-machine effect: the circumstances in which people prefer AI recommenders to human ones.

The word-of-machine effect.

The word-of-machine effect stems from a widespread belief that AI systems are more competent than humans in dispensing advice when utilitarian qualities are desired and are less competent when the hedonic qualities are desired. Importantly, the word-of-machine effect is based on a lay belief that does not necessarily correspond to the reality. The fact of the matter is humans are not necessarily less competent than AI at assessing and evaluating utilitarian attributes. Vice versa, AI is not necessarily less competent than humans at assessing and evaluating hedonic attributes….(More)”.

UK passport photo checker shows bias against dark-skinned women

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Maryam Ahmed at BBC News: “Women with darker skin are more than twice as likely to be told their photos fail UK passport rules when they submit them online than lighter-skinned men, according to a BBC investigation.

One black student said she was wrongly told her mouth looked open each time she uploaded five different photos to the government website.

This shows how “systemic racism” can spread, Elaine Owusu said.

The Home Office said the tool helped users get their passports more quickly.

“The indicative check [helps] our customers to submit a photo that is right the first time,” said a spokeswoman.

“Over nine million people have used this service and our systems are improving.

“We will continue to develop and evaluate our systems with the objective of making applying for a passport as simple as possible for all.”

Skin colour

The passport application website uses an automated check to detect poor quality photos which do not meet Home Office rules. These include having a neutral expression, a closed mouth and looking straight at the camera.

BBC research found this check to be less accurate on darker-skinned people.

More than 1,000 photographs of politicians from across the world were fed into the online checker.

The results indicated:

  • Dark-skinned women are told their photos are poor quality 22% of the time, while the figure for light-skinned women is 14%
  • Dark-skinned men are told their photos are poor quality 15% of the time, while the figure for light-skinned men is 9%

Photos of women with the darkest skin were four times more likely to be graded poor quality, than women with the lightest skin….(More)”.

Lessons learned from AI ethics principles for future actions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Merve Hickok: “As the use of artificial intelligence (AI) systems became significantly more prevalent in recent years, the concerns on how these systems collect, use and process big data also increased. To address these concerns and advocate for ethical and responsible development and implementation of AI, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), research centers, private companies, and governmental agencies published more than 100 AI ethics principles and guidelines. This first wave was followed by a series of suggested frameworks, tools, and checklists that attempt a technical fix to issues brought up in the high-level principles. Principles are important to create a common understanding for priorities and are the groundwork for future governance and opportunities for innovation. However, a review of these documents based on their country of origin and funding entities shows that private companies from US-West axis dominate the conversation. Several cases surfaced in the meantime which demonstrate biased algorithms and their impact on individuals and society. The field of AI ethics is urgently calling for tangible action to move from high-level abstractions and conceptual arguments towards applying ethics in practice and creating accountability mechanisms. However, lessons must be learned from the shortcomings of AI ethics principles to ensure the future investments, collaborations, standards, codes or legislation reflect the diversity of voices and incorporate the experiences of those who are already impacted by the biased algorithms….(More)”.

Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by By Xiaowei R. Wang: “In Blockchain Chicken Farm, the technologist and writer Xiaowei Wang explores the political and social entanglements of technology in rural China. Their discoveries force them to challenge the standard idea that rural culture and people are backward, conservative, and intolerant. Instead, they find that rural China has not only adapted to rapid globalization but has actually innovated the technology we all use today. From pork farmers using AI to produce the perfect pig, to disruptive luxury counterfeits and the political intersections of e-commerce villages, Wang unravels the ties between globalization, technology, agriculture, and commerce in unprecedented fashion. Accompanied by humorous “Sinofuturist” recipes that frame meals as they transform under new technology, Blockchain Chicken Farm is an original and probing look into innovation, connectivity, and collaboration in the digitized rural world.

FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today….(More)”.

AI Localism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Today, The GovLab is  excited to launch a new platform which seeks to monitor, analyze and guide how AI is being governed in cities around the world: AI Localism. 

AI Localism refers to the actions taken by local decision-makers to address the use of AI within a city or community.  AI Localism has often emerged because of gaps left by incomplete state, national or global governance frameworks.

“AI Localism offers both immediacy and proximity. Because it is managed within tightly defined geographic regions, it affords policymakers a better understanding of the tradeoffs involved. By calibrating algorithms and AI policies for local conditions, policymakers have a better chance of creating positive feedback loops that will result in greater effectiveness and accountability.”

The initial AI Localism projects include:

The Ethics and Practice of AI Localism at a Time of Covid-19 and Beyond – In collaboration with the TUM School of Governance and University of Melbourne The GovLab will conduct a comparative review of current practices worldwide to gain a better understanding of successful AI Localism in the context of COVID-19 as to inform and guide local leaders and city officials towards best practices.

Responsible AI at the Local Level – Together with the NYU Center Responsible AI, The GovLab will seek to develop an interactive repository and a set of training modules of Responsible AI approaches at the local level. 

Join us as we seek to understand and develop new forms of governance to guide local leaders towards responsible AI implementation or share any effort you are working on to establishing responsible AI at the local level by visiting: http://ailocalism.org

Amsterdam and Helsinki launch algorithm registries to bring transparency to public deployments of AI

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Khari Johnson at Venture Beat: “Amsterdam and Helsinki today launched AI registries to detail how each city government uses algorithms to deliver services, some of the first major cities in the world to do so. An AI Register for each city was introduced in beta today as part of the Next Generation Internet Policy Summit, organized in part by the European Commission and the city of Amsterdam. The Amsterdam registry currently features a handful of algorithms, but it will be extended to include all algorithms following the collection of feedback at the virtual conference to lay out a European vision of the future of the internet, according to a city official.

Each algorithm cited in the registry lists datasets used to train a model, a description of how an algorithm is used, how humans utilize the prediction, and how algorithms were assessed for potential bias or risks. The registry also provides citizens a way to give feedback on algorithms their local government uses and the name, city department, and contact information for the person responsible for the responsible deployment of a particular algorithm. A complete algorithmic registry can empower citizens and give them a way to evaluate, examine, or question governments’ applications of AI.

In a previous development in the U.S., New York City created an automated decision systems task force in 2017 to document and assess city use of algorithms. At the time it was the first city in the U.S. to do so. However, following the release of a report last year, commissioners on the task force complained about a lack of transparency and inability to access information about algorithms used by city government agencies….

In a statement accompanying the announcement, Helsinki City Data project manager Pasi Rautio said the registry is also aimed at increasing public trust in the kinds of artificial intelligence “with the greatest possible openness.”…(More)”.

Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Angèle Christin: “When the news moved online, journalists suddenly learned what their audiences actually liked, through algorithmic technologies that scrutinize web traffic and activity. Has this advent of audience metrics changed journalists’ work practices and professional identities? In Metrics at Work, Angèle Christin documents the ways that journalists grapple with audience data in the form of clicks, and analyzes how new forms of clickbait journalism travel across national borders.

Drawing on four years of fieldwork in web newsrooms in the United States and France, including more than one hundred interviews with journalists, Christin reveals many similarities among the media groups examined—their editorial goals, technological tools, and even office furniture. Yet she uncovers crucial and paradoxical differences in how American and French journalists understand audience analytics and how these affect the news produced in each country. American journalists routinely disregard traffic numbers and primarily rely on the opinion of their peers to define journalistic quality. Meanwhile, French journalists fixate on internet traffic and view these numbers as a sign of their resonance in the public sphere. Christin offers cultural and historical explanations for these disparities, arguing that distinct journalistic traditions structure how journalists make sense of digital measurements in the two countries.

Contrary to the popular belief that analytics and algorithms are globally homogenizing forces, Metrics at Work shows that computational technologies can have surprisingly divergent ramifications for work and organizations worldwide….(More)”.

Why Modeling the Spread of COVID-19 Is So Damn Hard


Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Matthew Hutson at IEEE Spectrum: “…Researchers say they’ve learned a lot of lessons modeling this pandemic, lessons that will carry over to the next.

The first set of lessons is all about data. Garbage in, garbage out, they say. Jarad Niemi, an associate professor of statistics at Iowa State University who helps run the forecast hub used by the CDC, says it’s not clear what we should be predicting. Infections, deaths, and hospitalization numbers each have problems, which affect their usefulness not only as inputs for the model but also as outputs. It’s hard to know the true number of infections when not everyone is tested. Deaths are easier to count, but they lag weeks behind infections. Hospitalization numbers have immense practical importance for planning, but not all hospitals release those figures. How useful is it to predict those numbers if you never have the true numbers for comparison? What we need, he said, is systematized random testing of the population, to provide clear statistics of both the number of people currently infected and the number of people who have antibodies against the virus, indicating recovery. Prakash, of Georgia Tech, says governments should collect and release data quickly in centralized locations. He also advocates for central repositories of policy decisions, so modelers can quickly see which areas are implementing which distancing measures.

Researchers also talked about the need for a diversity of models. At the most basic level, averaging an ensemble of forecasts improves reliability. More important, each type of model has its own uses—and pitfalls. An SEIR model is a relatively simple tool for making long-term forecasts, but the devil is in the details of its parameters: How do you set those to match real-world conditions now and into the future? Get them wrong and the model can head off into fantasyland. Data-driven models can make accurate short-term forecasts, and machine learning may be good for predicting complicated factors. But will the inscrutable computations of, for instance, a neural network remain reliable when conditions change? Agent-based models look ideal for simulating possible interventions to guide policy, but they’re a lot of work to build and tricky to calibrate.

Finally, researchers emphasize the need for agility. Niemi of Iowa State says software packages have made it easier to build models quickly, and the code-sharing site GitHub lets people share and compare their models. COVID-19 is giving modelers a chance to try out all their newest tools, says Meyers, of the University of Texas. “The pace of innovation, the pace of development, is unlike ever before,” she says. “There are new statistical methods, new kinds of data, new model structures.”…(More)”.

AI planners in Minecraft could help machines design better cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Will Douglas Heaven: “A dozen or so steep-roofed buildings cling to the edges of an open-pit mine. High above them, on top of an enormous rock arch, sits an inaccessible house. Elsewhere, a railway on stilts circles a group of multicolored tower blocks. Ornate pagodas decorate a large paved plaza. And a lone windmill turns on an island, surrounded by square pigs. This is Minecraft city-building, AI style.

Minecraft has long been a canvas for wild invention. Fans have used the hit block-building game to create replicas of everything from downtown Chicago and King’s Landing to working CPUs. In the decade since its first release, anything that can be built has been.

Since 2018, Minecraft has also been the setting for a creative challenge that stretches the abilities of machines. The annual Generative Design in Minecraft (GDMC) competition asks participants to build an artificial intelligence that can generate realistic towns or villages in previously unseen locations. The contest is just for fun, for now, but the techniques explored by the various AI competitors are precursors of ones that real-world city planners could use….(More)”.

Models and Modeling in the Sciences: A Philosophical Introduction

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Stephen M. Downes: “Biologists, climate scientists, and economists all rely on models to move their work forward. In this book, Stephen M. Downes explores the use of models in these and other fields to introduce readers to the various philosophical issues that arise in scientific modeling. Readers learn that paying attention to models plays a crucial role in appraising scientific work.　

This book first presents a wide range of models from a number of different scientific disciplines. After assembling some illustrative examples, Downes demonstrates how models shed light on many perennial issues in philosophy of science and in philosophy in general. Reviewing the range of views on how models represent their targets introduces readers to the key issues in debates on representation, not only in science but in the arts as well. Also, standard epistemological questions are cast in new and interesting ways when readers confront the question, “What makes for a good (or bad) model?”…(More)’.