Springer Nature Was Asked Not To Publish A Deep Learning Paper

"Machine learning does not have a built-in mechanism for investigating or discussing the social and political merits of its outputs." Two thousand two hundred twelve expert researchers and practitioners across a variety of technical, scientific, and humanistic fields, including statistics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, law, sociology, history, communication studies and anthropology have joined hands to sign a petition to stop Springer Nature from publishing a potentially malicious research paper. Springer Nature plans to publish an article "A Deep Neural Network Model to Predict Criminality Using Image Processing" that revives long discredited physiognomist pseudoscience. Sign this petition to urge @SpringerNature to refrain from publishing. The argument here is that the uncritical acceptance of default assumptions inevitably leads to discriminatory design in algorithmic systems, reproducing ideas which normalize social hierarchies and legitimise violence against marginalised groups.