Machine learning and stop-and-think

To create an inclusive community that successfully tackles issues like discrimination, we need open lines of communication between faculty and students. When that communication breaks down, a misunderstanding can turn ugly and prevent real progress. We saw an example of this recently when Professor Satyen Kale assigned his machine learning class a project: to train classifiers on the New York Police Department's stop-and-frisk dataset. Stop-and-frisk was a controversial NYPD interrogation program that disproportionately targeted young black and Hispanic men and was ruled unconstitutional and discriminatory by a federal court in 2013. The assignment, satirically titled "Help design RoboCop!" was an exercise using records of searches conducted by the NYPD.