How can businesses protect sensitive user data to foster trust among consumers? How can they design products and tools that avoid racial, gender, and other biases towards users? How should they decide who uses their products, and for what purpose? The answers to these and other questions are especially pertinent to the developers of artificial […]
Technologists, managers, and policymakers all have a seat at the table here. Assembly, a collaboration of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard and the MIT Media Lab, is about creating space for cross-sector teams to crack the code to some of AI’s toughest ethical and governance problems — problems that would otherwise fall out of reach.
The current intense focus on machine learning’s biases is crucial because the issue is not only real, it’s rooted in machine learning’s essence: ML constructs models based on the data we feed it, and unless great care is taken, that data will reflect existing biases. But, focusing on fairness is not enough when addressing the […]
Many managers want to be more inclusive, but they don’t know how to get there. They are often not given the right tools to overcome the challenges posed by implicit biases. Research shows there are two, small—but more powerful—ways managers can block bias: first, by closely examining and broadening their definitions of success, and second, […]
Is there a ‘cost’ to online harassment? Is it quantifiable? Beyond the toll it weighs on human victims, the rampant toxicity we see across social networks and communities, does this toxicity affect the bottom line of social networks? Well, in December 2018, Amnesty International released a robust report on online harassment against women politicians and […]
The argument that the education pipeline does not produce enough qualified women to take up positions in science and technology-related industries does not hold water. In the US, labour force data show that the number of women working in computing and other digital technology jobs is disproportionately lower than the number of women graduating from […]
This article originally appeared in The Harvard Gazette. It is the best of times. Nearly equal numbers of American women and men now go into medicine and law. More women than men graduate from college and graduate school. The gap between men’s and women’s pay has shrunk in recent decades. It is the worst of […]
Access isn’t everything. As “tech jobs” in fields like software engineering and data science have become among the most lucrative and exciting in the current economy, concern about who holds these jobs, and reaps their rewards, has grown, and not only among industry watchers and experts. Technology companies feel increasing pressure from investors, the public, […]
