News

---

Jun 2020

• Jun 9: I will be part of the Utah State Auditor's Commission on Protecting Privacy and Preventing Discrimination
• Jun 1: New Paper: Problems with Shapley-value-based explanations as feature importance measuresaccepted to ICML 2020.

May 2020

• May 19: Talk at NSF CISE-SBE Roundtable on Harnessing the Computational and Social Sciences to Solve Critical Societal Problems
• May 12: Talk to University of Utah Alumni Association on social and ethical ramifications of machine learning in society.
• May 12: Talk at the University of Chicago's CAPP program on algorithmic fairness

January 2020

• Jan 27-30: At the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency
• Jan 9-10: At Data Science across the Undergraduate Curriculum

December 2019

• Dec 12-14: At Social Responsibility of Algorithms, 2019

November 2019

• Nov 18-19: At COHUBICOL Philosopher's Seminar

October 2019

• Oct 25: Kaitlin Pettit and I presented on our course on Ethics in Data Science at the Intermountain West Student Philosophy Conference.
• Oct 15: I discussed algorithmic fairness in medicine at SINAInnovations 2019.
• Oct 11: I attended the first meeting of the Research Advisory Council convened by the First District Court of Pennsylvania to discuss pretrial risk assessments.

September 2019

• Sep 27: I attended 'Beyond Risk Assessment: Algorithmic Governance in Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice' at Drexel University's Kline School of Law.

August 2019

• Aug 16: I'm on Slate's Secret History of the Future podcast talking about algorithms and bias.

July 2019

• Jul 10: I was interviewed about the problems with ICE using DMV databases and facial recognition to search for suspects (Cat Sandoval, Newsy)
• Jul 3: I delivered an invited tutorial at PODS 2019 (warning: 8.6 MB!) on algorithmic fairness

June 2019

• Jun 25: I weighed in the new trend of using audio surveillance to monitor children in schools
• Jun 20: New preprint: Disentangling Influence: Using Disentangled Representations to Audit Model Predictions.
• Jun 18-21: I was at the IMA attending Recent Themes in Resource Tradeoffs: Privacy, Fairness, and Robustness Workshop. I talked about Gaps in Information Access in Social Networks.
• Jun 5: I was on KPCC's AirTalk with Larry Mantle to discuss new problems with YouTube's recommendation algorithm.

May 2019

• May 22-23: I was at the CCC workshop on Fairness in Economics in Boston.
• May 20-21: I attended an Amnesty International event in the Netherlands on predictive policing in Europe.
• May 15: Ashkan Bashardoust presented our paper on Gaps in Information Access in Networks at the 2019 Web Conference. See also the blog post by Ben Fish.

April 2019

• Apr 30: Sorelle Friedler and Seny Kamara and I were just awarded a grant from the Mozilla Foundation to build out ethics modules in the data structures and algorithms curriculum!
• Apr 25: I'm interviewed for My Favorite Theorem - I talk about pigeons and Fano's inequality.
• Apr 25: My new post on structural disconnects between machine learning and the law when it comes to decision-making, at the ICRC blog.
• Apr 23, 2019: On Instagram's use of content filters for sexually suggestive content (Medium, by Lux Alptraum)

March 2019

• Mar 10: Bay Area police try out controversial AI software that tells them where to patrol(Ethan Baron, The Mercury News)

February 2019

• Feb 14: "Runaway Feedback Loops in Predictive Policing" was covered by Caroline Haskins (Motherboard): Academics Confirm Major Predictive Policing Algorithm is Fundamentally Flawed.
• Feb 14: I'm at ITA, participating in the privacy and fairness plenary session.
• Feb 6: Two news articles covered our paper "Fairness and Abstraction in Sociotechnical Systems" (The Next Web, and Technology Review).

January 2019

• Jan 31: Our paper on stereotypes as a harm of representation will appear in SIAM Data Mining, 2019.
• Jan 29-31: At the ACM FAT* conference
• Jan 11-12: Organizing FAT/Asia together with Malavika Jayaram and the Digital Asia Hub
• Jan 8-10: Visiting NUS to celebrate Research Week 2019

December 2018

• Dec 3-4: Visiting Harvard Law to help international humanitarian lawyers understand ML and talk about risk assessments in the military.

November 2018

• Nov 25, 2018: I was interviewed by Ava Hofman for the Intercept: The dangerous junk science of vocal risk assessment.
• Nov 6-9, 2018: Attending Explanations And Understanding in the Age of Algorithms in Bielefeld, Germany

October 2018

• Oct 29, 2018: I was interviewed by Rose Eveleth for Motherboard: Facing Tomorrow's High-Tech School Surveillance
• Oct 16, 2018: I talked about "The computational and ethical ramifications of automated decision-making in society" at Brown University.
• Oct 3, 2018: I talked about "The computational and ethical ramifications of automated decision-making in society" at Wellesley College.
• Oct 2, 2018: I gave a lecture Towards a theory (or theories) of fairness" at the ToC colloquium at MIT. (slides)

September 2018

• Sep 21, 2018: I was on a panel at BYU's Criminal Law and Justice Conference, discussing predictive algorithms in criminal justice.
• Sep 14, 2018: I was interviewed on Science Friday regarding algorithms and bias.

July 2018

• Jul 27, 2018: I was interviewed for a CNN article on the ACLU experiment with Amazon's Rekognition system.

June 2018

• June 29, 2018: I was interviewed for a BBC World Service segment on facial recognition.
• June 20, 2018: I was interviewed for Bias detectives: the researchers striving to make algorithms fair(Nature News, by Rachel Courtland)
• June 5: I delivered a keynote at the 2nd workshop on Ethics in NLP

May 2018

• May 16: I was interviewed for How We Made AI As Racist and Sexist As Humans(The Walrus, by Danielle Groen).
• May 10: "Mr. Spock has left the building: the computational and ethical ramifications of automated decision-making in society." - a talk delivered at the University at Buffalo.
• May 9: I was interviewed about the errors in facial recognition systems.
• May 1: I'm a new member of the Computing Community Consortium Council!

April 2018

• Apr 20: My paper with Samira Daruki and Aditya Bhaskara on sublinear algorithms for MAX CUT was accepted to ICALP 2018

March 2018

• Mar 10: I was interviewed for Computersystemen bepalen steeds vaker wat we zien, maar hoe leer je een computer wat ethiek is?(Trouw, by Kiki Kolman and Fadi Nadrous).

February 2018

• 2/22-2/26: I was at the first FAT* conference in NYC.
• 2/14: I was on KPCC talking with Larry Mantle on AirTalk regarding algorithms for pre-trial risk assessment.
• 2/8: I was interviewed for the article Is your software racist? (Politico, by Li Zhou).
• 2/2: I spoke at a panel on big data and policing at the Shaping Justice conference at UVA.

January 2018

• 1/10: I'll talk about the math behind gerrymandering at the Whitmore Library (event sponsored by the Fair Redistricting Caucus of Utah).
• A report on the use of double blind reviewing at ALENEX 2018 (which I co-chaired).
• A new blog post on our work that mathematically models predictive policing, explains why current methods will not work, and shows how to fix them.
• 1/6-1/10: I'll be at ALENEX and SODA in New Orleans.

December

• 12/11: I delivered a keynote on algorithmic fairness at the 28th International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation.

November

• 11/28: I was at the Salt Lake City Data Science Meetup talking about algorithmic fairness.
• 11/17: A defense of academic work in algorithmic fairness and accountability.
• 11/17: I was at an ACLU meeting in NYC on pre-trial risk assessment.
• 11/4: I gave a keynote at the 27th Fall Workshop on Computational Geometry, at Stony Brook.

October

• 10/30: I was at the Oxford Internet Institute speaking at a workshop on Ethical Auditing for Accountable Automated Decision-making.
• 10/20: I lectured at the Timpanogos Women's Facility in Draper as part of the Utah Prison Education Project run by Erin L. Castro from the Department of Education Leadership and Policy. See my blog post describing my experience.
• 10/16: My student Scott Neville presented our work on hardness of discovering interesting things about neural networks at ALT 2017.

August/September

• 9/29: X is a social construct" and the perils of mining behavior (from the Geomblog)
• 8/31: I gave a public lecture on algorithmic fairness at the Salt Lake Public Library.