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Spring 2021 #OSSTA Lecture: Bomani Oseni McClendon

I’ve found that iden­ti­fy­ing ways to be a part of shared col­lab­o­ra­tive and com­mu­ni­ty projects that pro­duce knowl­edge or build infra­struc­ture that has been influ­en­tial and instruc­tive for me has con­nect­ed me to a lot of real­ly amaz­ing peo­ple and ideas. And so, most rel­e­vant to this pre­sen­ta­tion I want to talk about how my more recent work as an open source main­tain­er has actu­al­ly helped me learn more about how to be present in com­mu­ni­ties that are impor­tant to me. 

Towards an Artificial Brain

The goal of MICrONS is three­fold. One is they asked us to go and mea­sure the activ­i­ty in a liv­ing brain while an ani­mal actu­al­ly learns to do some­thing, and watch how that activ­i­ty changes. Two, to take that brain out and map exhaus­tive­ly the wiring dia­gram” of every neu­ron con­nect­ing to every oth­er neu­ron in that ani­mal’s brain in the par­tic­u­lar region. And then third, to use those two pieces of infor­ma­tion to build bet­ter machine learn­ing. So let it nev­er be said that IARPA is unambitious.

(Data) Trust is the New Oil
Redesigning the data economy to optimize for trust

The pow­er of data has nev­er been big­ger than it is today and I think this can be a great thing, even though it is also cre­at­ing some exis­ten­tial risks.

Surveillance State of the Union

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

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. 

Parenting a Mind

BJ Copeland states that a strong AI machine would be one, built in the form of a man; two, have the same sen­so­ry per­cep­tion as a human; and three, go through the same edu­ca­tion and learn­ing process­es as a human child. With these three attrib­ut­es, sim­i­lar to human devel­op­ment, the mind of the machine would be born as a child and will even­tu­al­ly mature as an adult. 

Artificial Intelligence is Hard to See: Social & Ethical Impacts of AI

The big con­cerns that I have about arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence are real­ly not about the Singularity, which frankly com­put­er sci­en­tists say is…if it’s pos­si­ble at all it’s hun­dreds of years away. I’m actu­al­ly much more inter­est­ed in the effects that we are see­ing of AI now.

Big Data Bodies: Machines and Algorithms in the World

I’m inter­est­ed in data and dis­crim­i­na­tion, in the things that have come to make us unique­ly who we are, how we look, where we are from, our per­son­al and demo­graph­ic iden­ti­ties, what lan­guages we speak. These things are effec­tive­ly incom­pre­hen­si­ble to machines. What is gen­er­al­ly cel­e­brat­ed as human diver­si­ty and expe­ri­ence is trans­formed by machine read­ing into some­thing absurd, some­thing that marks us as different.

Ethical Machines episode 4: David J. Klein

One of the most impor­tant insights that I’ve got­ten in work­ing with biol­o­gists and ecol­o­gists is that today it’s actu­al­ly not real­ly known on a sci­en­tif­ic basis how well dif­fer­ent con­ser­va­tion inter­ven­tions will work. And it’s because we just don’t have a lot of data.

Data & Society Databite #101: Machine Learning: What’s Fair and How Do We Decide?

The ques­tion is what are we doing in the indus­try, or what is the machine learn­ing research com­mu­ni­ty doing, to com­bat instances of algo­rith­mic bias? So I think there is a cer­tain amount of good news, and it’s the good news that I want­ed to focus on in my talk today. 

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