Articles repérés par Hervé Le Crosnier

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  • AI bias creep is a problem that’s hard to fix | Biometric Update
    https://www.biometricupdate.com/202002/__trashed-6

    On the heels of a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) study on demographic differentials of biometric facial recognition accuracy, Karen Hao, an artificial intelligence authority and reporter for MIT Technology Review, recently explained that “bias can creep in at many stages of the [AI] deep-learning process” because “the standard practices in computer science aren’t designed to detect it.”

    “Fixing discrimination in algorithmic systems is not something that can be solved easily,” explained Andrew Selbst, a post-doctoral candidate at the Data & Society Research Institute, and lead author of the recent paper, Fairness and Abstraction in Sociotechnical Systems.

    “A key goal of the fair-ML community is to develop machine-learning based systems that, once introduced into a social context, can achieve social and legal outcomes such as fairness, justice, and due process,” the paper’s authors, which include Danah Boyd, Sorelle A. Friedler, Suresh Venkatasubramanian, and Janet Vertesi, noted, adding that “(b)edrock concepts in computer science – such as abstraction and modular design – are used to define notions of fairness and discrimination, to produce fairness-aware learning algorithms, and to intervene at different stages of a decision-making pipeline to produce ‘fair’ outcomes.”

    Consequently, just recently a broad coalition of more than 100 civil rights, digital justice, and community-based organizations issued a joint statement of civil rights concerns in which they highlighted concerns with the adoption of algorithmic-based decision making tools.

    Explaining why “AI bias is hard to fix,” Hoa cited as an example, “unknown unknowns. The introduction of bias isn’t always obvious during a model’s construction because you may not realize the downstream impacts of your data and choices until much later. Once you do, it’s hard to retroactively identify where that bias came from and then figure out how to get rid of it.”

    Hoa also blames “lack of social context,” meaning “the way in which computer scientists are taught to frame problems often isn’t compatible with the best way to think about social problems.”

    Then there are the definitions of fairness where it’s not at all “clear what the absence of bias should look like,” Hoa argued, noting, “this isn’t true just in computer science – this question has a long history of debate in philosophy, social science, and law. What’s different about computer science is that the concept of fairness has to be defined in mathematical terms, like balancing the false positive and false negative rates of a prediction system. But as researchers have discovered, there are many different mathematical definitions of fairness that are also mutually exclusive.”

    “A very important aspect of ethical behavior is to avoid (intended, perceived, or accidental) bias,” which they said “occurs when the data distribution is not representative enough of the natural phenomenon one wants to model and reason about. The possibly biased behavior of a service is hard to detect and handle if the AI service is merely being used and not developed from scratch since the training data set is not available.”

    #Machine_learning #Intelligence_artificielle #Société #Sciences_sociales