Just before I flew back to Seattle, I gave a talk last week at my alma mater – School of Computer Science & Engineering at UNSW, Australia. It was great to see some familiar faces and meet some new ones that I hope feel more compelled to tackle some interesting problems in data science, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI).
In this talk, I shared some the personal lessons that I learnt as part of building AI & ML solutions at companies like Amazon and Oracle. I also opened up about my fears of these technologies, as well as the challenges that the industry faces in delivering intelligent systems for the 99% (?) of businesses. You can find the slides from the talk (PDF) for the references and links that I mentioned. Just send an email to ( avishkar @ gmail dot com) with the subject “AI & ML” to get the password to the PDF.
The most important message that I wanted to impart to the room full of researchers, academics, and industry practitioners was how do we collectively address the shortage of skills needed to develop AI and ML solutions to the broad range of business problems beyond the top 1% of leading-edge tech companies. Education, standards and automated tools can help ensure a certain base level of competency in the application of AI & ML.
The vast majority of the businesses out there are not Google, Amazon or Facebook, with deep pockets and years of R&D experience to tackle the challenge of applying AI and ML. Everyone from schools (i.e. universities) and industry responsible for growing this field must also develop standards and tools that ensure a certain level of quality is maintained for the solutions that we put into production. We have had standards when it comes to mechanical and civil engineering to ensure that things that can impact people’s lives and safety adhere to a certain quality standard. Similarly, we should also develop standards and encourage organizations to validate compliance with those standards when it comes to developing AI & ML solutions with far-reaching consequences.
A simple and very personal example was that one of my own photos was rejected by the automated checks to verify that a passport photo complies with the requirements for visas. The fact that the slightly “browner” version of me (left) failed the check seems to suggest an inherent bias in the system due to the kind of data used to build the system. Funny but scary. How many other “brown” people have had their photos rejected by such a system?
Other examples would be Human Resource systems that identify potential candidates, suggests no-/hire decisions or recommends salary packages to new hires. If the system is trained on historical data and uses gender as a feature, is it possible that the system could be biased against women for high-profile or senior positions? Afterall historically women have been under-representative in senior positions. Standards and compliance verification tools can help us identify such biases, ensuring that data and models do not introduce biases that are unacceptable in a modern and equitable society.
Academics, researchers, and industry practitioners cannot absolve themselves of the duty of care and consideration when developing systems that have a broad social impact. Data scientists must think beyond the accuracy metric and the whole ecosystem in which the system operates.
Image Credit:
- Modeling API by H Alberto Gongora from the Noun Project
- education by Rockicon from the Noun Project
- tools by Aleksandr Vector from the Noun Project
- Checklist by Ralf Schmitzer from the Noun Project