Law
The invisible power of fairness. How machine learning shapes democracy
Beretta, Elena, Santangelo, Antonio, Lepri, Bruno, Vetrò, Antonio, De Martin, Juan Carlos
Many machine learning systems make extensive use of large amounts of data regarding human behaviors. Several researchers have found various discriminatory practices related to the use of human-related machine learning systems, for example in the field of criminal justice, credit scoring and advertising. Fair machine learning is therefore emerging as a new field of study to mitigate biases that are inadvertently incorporated into algorithms. Data scientists and computer engineers are making various efforts to provide definitions of fairness. In this paper, we provide an overview of the most widespread definitions of fairness in the field of machine learning, arguing that the ideas highlighting each formalization are closely related to different ideas of justice and to different interpretations of democracy embedded in our culture. This work intends to analyze the definitions of fairness that have been proposed to date to interpret the underlying criteria and to relate them to different ideas of democracy.
A multiple criteria methodology for prioritizing and selecting portfolios of urban projects
Barbati, Maria, Figueira, Josè Rui, Greco, Salvatore, Ishizaka, Alessio, Panaro, Simona
This paper presents an integrated methodology supporting decisions in urban planning. In particular, it deals with the prioritization and the selection of a portfolio of projects related to buildings of some values for the cultural heritage in cities. More precisely, our methodology has been validated to the historical center of Naples, Italy. Each project is assessed on the basis of a set of both quantitative and qualitative criteria with the purpose to determine their level of priority for further selection. This step was performed through the application of the Electre Tri-nC method which is a multiple criteria outranking based method for ordinal classification (or sorting) problems and allows to assign a priority level to each project as an analytical "recommendation" tool. To identify the efficient portfolios and to support the selection of the most adequate set of projects to activate, a set of resources (namely budgetary constraints) as well as some logical constraints related to urban policy requirements have to be taken into consideration together with the priority of projects in a portfolio analysis model. The process has been conducted by means of the interaction between analysts, municipality representative and experts. The proposed methodology is generic enough to be applied to other territorial or urban planning problems. We strongly believe that, given the increasing interest of historical cities to restore their cultural heritage, the integrated multiple criteria decision aiding analytical tool proposed in this paper has significant potential to be used in the future.
Tesla alleges self-driving car startup Zoox stole company secrets
Tesla filed a lawsuit this week against four former employees for allegedly stealing trade secrets and providing them to a rival company. According to the complaint filed with the US district court for Northern California, the ex-Tesla workers gave confidential information to autonomous vehicle start-up Zoox. The documents allegedly allowed the company to accelerate the development of its technology by cribbing off of Tesla's proprietary work. According to Tesla, the four former employees violated the terms of their contracts by forwarding documents and other information from work email addresses to personal accounts. The files included inventory documents, company schematics and other proprietary pieces of information.
Artificial Intelligence : from Research to Application ; the Upper-Rhine Artificial Intelligence Symposium (UR-AI 2019)
The TriRhenaTech alliance universities and their partners presented their competences in the field of artificial intelligence and their cross-border cooperations with the industry at the tri-national conference 'Artificial Intelligence : from Research to Application' on March 13th, 2019 in Offenburg. The TriRhenaTech alliance is a network of universities in the Upper Rhine Trinational Metropolitan Region comprising of the German universities of applied sciences in Furtwangen, Kaiserslautern, Karlsruhe, and Offenburg, the Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University Loerrach, the French university network Alsace Tech (comprised of 14 'grandes \'ecoles' in the fields of engineering, architecture and management) and the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland. The alliance's common goal is to reinforce the transfer of knowledge, research, and technology, as well as the cross-border mobility of students.
Towards Standardization of Data Licenses: The Montreal Data License
Benjamin, Misha, Gagnon, Paul, Rostamzadeh, Negar, Pal, Chris, Bengio, Yoshua, Shee, Alex
This paper provides a taxonomy for the licensing of data in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The paper's goal is to build towards a common framework for data licensing akin to the licensing of open source software. Increased transparency and resolving conceptual ambiguities in existing licensing language are two noted benefits of the approach proposed in the paper. In parallel, such benefits may help foster fairer and more efficient markets for data through bringing about clearer tools and concepts that better define how data can be used in the fields of AI and ML. The paper's approach is summarized in a new family of data license language - \textit{the Montreal Data License (MDL)}. Alongside this new license, the authors and their collaborators have developed a web-based tool to generate license language espousing the taxonomies articulated in this paper.
Empirical Evaluations of Seed Set Selection Strategies for Predictive Coding
Mahoney, Christian J., Huber-Fliflet, Nathaniel, Jensen, Katie, Zhao, Haozhen, Neary, Robert, Ye, Shi
Training documents have a significant impact on the performance of predictive models in the legal domain. Yet, there is limited research that explores the effectiveness of the training document selection strategy - in particular, the strategy used to select the seed set, or the set of documents an attorney reviews first to establish an initial model. Since there is limited research on this important component of predictive coding, the authors of this paper set out to identify strategies that consistently perform well. Our research demonstrated that the seed set selection strategy can have a significant impact on the precision of a predictive model. Enabling attorneys with the results of this study will allow them to initiate the most effective predictive modeling process to comb through the terabytes of data typically present in modern litigation. This study used documents from four actual legal cases to evaluate eight different seed set selection strategies. Attorneys can use the results contained within this paper to enhance their approach to predictive coding.
Ontology of Card Sleights
We present a machine-readable movement writing for sleight-of-hand moves with cards -- a "Labanotation of card magic." This scheme of movement writing contains 440 categories of motion, and appears to taxonomize all card sleights that have appeared in over 1500 publications. The movement writing is axiomatized in $\mathcal{SROIQ}$(D) Description Logic, and collected formally as an Ontology of Card Sleights, a computational ontology that extends the Basic Formal Ontology and the Information Artifact Ontology. The Ontology of Card Sleights is implemented in OWL DL, a Description Logic fragment of the Web Ontology Language. While ontologies have historically been used to classify at a less granular level, the algorithmic nature of card tricks allows us to transcribe a performer's actions step by step. We conclude by discussing design criteria we have used to ensure the ontology can be accessed and modified with a simple click-and-drag interface. This may allow database searches and performance transcriptions by users with card magic knowledge, but no ontology background.
1 Year After Uber's Fatal Crash, Robocars Carry On Quietly
In America, 2018 was supposed to be a very big year for self-driving cars. Uber quietly prepped to launch a robo-taxi service. Waymo said riders would be able to catch a driverless ride by year's end. General Motors' Cruise said it would start testing in New York City, the country's traffic chaos capital. Congress was poised to pass legislation that would set broad outlines for federal regulation of the tech.
Multi-Differential Fairness Auditor for Black Box Classifiers
Gitiaux, Xavier, Rangwala, Huzefa
Machine learning algorithms are increasingly involved in sensitive decision-making process with adversarial implications on individuals. This paper presents mdfa, an approach that identifies the characteristics of the victims of a classifier's discrimination. We measure discrimination as a violation of multi-differential fairness. Multi-differential fairness is a guarantee that a black box classifier's outcomes do not leak information on the sensitive attributes of a small group of individuals. We reduce the problem of identifying worst-case violations to matching distributions and predicting where sensitive attributes and classifier's outcomes coincide. We apply mdfa to a recidivism risk assessment classifier and demonstrate that individuals identified as African-American with little criminal history are three-times more likely to be considered at high risk of violent recidivism than similar individuals but not African-American.
Courts Are Using AI to Sentence Criminals. That Must Stop Now
There is a stretch of highway through the Ozark Mountains where being data-driven is a hazard. Jason Tashea (@justicecodes), a writer and technologist based in Baltimore, is the founder of Justice Codes, a criminal justice and technology consultancy. Heading from Springfield, Missouri, to Clarksville, Arkansas, navigation apps recommend the Arkansas 43. While this can be the fastest route, the GPS's algorithm does not concern itself with factors important to truckers carrying a heavy load, such as the 43's 1,300-foot elevation drop over four miles with two sharp turns. The road once hosted few 18-wheelers, but the last two and half years have seen a noticeable increase in truck traffic--and wrecks.