Machine Learning Bias and Fairness with Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell

This week, we dive into machine learning bias and fairness from a social and technical perspective with machine learning research scientists Timnit Gebru from Microsoft and Margaret Mitchell (aka Meg, aka M.) from Google.

They share with Melanie and Mark about ongoing efforts and resources to address bias and fairness including diversifying datasets, applying algorithmic techniques and expanding research team expertise and perspectives. There is not a simple solution to the challenge, and they give insights on what work in the broader community is in progress and where it is going.

Timnit Gebru

Timnit Gebru works in the Fairness Accountability Transparency and Ethics (FATE) group at the New York Lab. Prior to joining Microsoft Research, she was a PhD student in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, studying computer vision under Fei-Fei Li. Her main research interest is in data mining large-scale, publicly available images to gain sociological insight, and working on computer vision problems that arise as a result, including fine-grained image recognition, scalable annotation of images, and domain adaptation. The Economist and others have recently covered part of this work. She is currently studying how to take dataset bias into account while designing machine learning algorithms, and the ethical considerations underlying any data mining project. As a cofounder of the group Black in AI, she works to both increase diversity in the field and reduce the impact of racial bias in the data.

Margaret Mitchell

M. Mitchell is a Senior Research Scientist in Google's Research & Machine Intelligence group, working on artificial intelligence. Her research involves vision-language and grounded language generation, focusing on how to evolve artificial intelligence toward positive goals. Margaret's work combines machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, social media, and insights from cognitive science. Before Google, Margaret was a founding member of Microsoft Research's "Cognition" group, focused on advancing artificial intelligence, and a researcher in Microsoft Research's Natural Language Processing group.

Cool things of the week

• GPS/Cellular Asset Tracking using Google Cloud IoT Core, Firestore and MongooseOS blog
• GPUs in Kubernetes Engine now available in beta blog
• Announcing Spring Cloud GCP - integrating your favorite Java framework with Google Cloud blog

Interview

• PAIR | People+AI Research Initiative site
• FATE | Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Ethics in AI site
• Fat* Conference site & resources
• Joy Buolamwini site
• Algorithmic Justice Leaguge site
• ProPublica Machine Bias article
• AI Ethics & Society Conference site
• Ethics in NLP Conference site
• FACETS site
• TensorFlow Lattice repo

Sample papers on bias and fairness:

• Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification paper
• Facial Recognition is Accurate, if You're a White Guy article
• Mitigating Unwanted Biases with Adversarial Learning paper
• Improving Smiling Detection with Race and Gender Diversity paper
• Fairness Through Awareness paper
• Avoiding Discrimination through Casual Reasoning paper
• Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings paper
• Satisfying Real-world Goals with Dataset Constraints paper
• Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks paper
• Monotonic Calibrated Interpolated Look-Up Tables paper
• Equality of Opportunity in Machine Learning blog

Additional links:

• Bill Nye Saves the World Episode 3: Machines Take Over the World (includes Margaret Mitchell) site
• "We're in a diversity crisis": Black in AI's founder on what's poisoning the algorithms in our lives article
• Using Deep Learning and Google Street View to Estimate Demographics with Timnit Gebru TWiML & AI podcast
• Security and Safety in AI: Adversarial Examples, Bias and Trust with Mustapha Cisse TWiML & AI podcast
• How we can build AI to help humans, not hurt us TED
• PAIR Symposium conference

Question of the week

"Is there a gcp service that's cloud identity-aware proxy except for a static site that you host via cloud storage?"

• Answer between Mark & KF
• Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy site & docs
• Cloud Storage site & docs
• Hosting a Static Website on Cloud Storage site
• Google App Engine site & docs
• weasel repo

Where can you find us next?

Melanie will be at Fat* in New York in Feb.

Mark will be at the Game Developer's Conference | GDC in March.