MIT Harvard 2019 Assembly Showcase

Watch Your Words

presented by Bernease Herman, Erich Ludwig, Joseph Williams, Walt Frick

The premise of our project is real­ly that we are sur­round­ed by machines that are read­ing what we write, and judg­ing us based on what­ev­er they think we’re saying. 

Surveillance State of the Union

presented by B Cavello, Carl Governale

We want­ed to look at how sur­veil­lance, how these algo­rith­mic deci­sion­mak­ing sys­tems and sur­veil­lance sys­tems feed into this kind of tar­get­ing deci­sion­mak­ing. And in par­tic­u­lar what we’re going to talk about today is the role of the AI research com­mu­ni­ty. How that research ends up in the real world being used with real-world consequences.

Kaleidoscope: Positionality-aware Machine Learning

presented by Elizabeth Dubois

Positionality is the spe­cif­ic posi­tion or per­spec­tive that an indi­vid­ual takes giv­en their past expe­ri­ences, their knowl­edge; their world­view is shaped by posi­tion­al­i­ty. It’s a unique but par­tial view of the world. And when we’re design­ing machines we’re embed­ding posi­tion­al­i­ty into those machines with all of the choic­es we’re mak­ing about what counts and what does­n’t count. 

AI Blindspot

presented by Dan Taber

AI Blindspot is a dis­cov­ery process for spot­ting uncon­scious bias­es and struc­tur­al inequal­i­ties in AI systems.