There are well-documented examples of AI systems making decisions that affect protected classes, such as housing assistance or unemployment benefits. AI can be used to screen resumes; banks apply AI models to grant individual consumers credit and set interest rates for them. Many small decisions, taken together, can have large effects, such as: AI-driven price discrimination could lead to certain groups in a society consistently paying more. But are there AI applications today that affect everyone, no matter their "class"? As I mentioned earlier, we are shifting our AI Ethics courses to more practical, useful techniques.

Correctly detecting the semantic type of data columns is crucial for data science tasks such as automated data cleaning, schema matching, and data discovery. Existing data preparation and analysis systems rely on dictionary lookups and regular expression matching to detect semantic types. However, these matching-based approaches often are not robust to dirty data and only detect a limited number of types. We introduce Sherlock, a multi-input deep neural network for detecting semantic types. We train Sherlock on $686,765$ data columns retrieved from the VizNet corpus by matching $78$ semantic types from DBpedia to column headers. We characterize each matched column with $1,588$ features describing the statistical properties, character distributions, word embeddings, and paragraph vectors of column values. Sherlock achieves a support-weighted F$_1$ score of $0.89$, exceeding that of machine learning baselines, dictionary and regular expression benchmarks, and the consensus of crowdsourced annotations.