New machine learning algorithms offer safety and fairness guarantees

IMAGE: Philip Thomas at UMass Amherst, with colleagues there and at Stanford, says they say they hope that machine learning researchers will go on to develop new and more sophisticated... view more Guaranteeing safe and fair machine behavior is still an issue today, says machine learning researcher and lead author Philip Thomas at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. "When someone applies a machine learning algorithm, it's hard to control its behavior," he points out. This risks undesirable outcomes from algorithms that direct everything from self-driving vehicles to insulin pumps to criminal sentencing, say he and co-authors. Writing in Science, Thomas and his colleagues Yuriy Brun, Andrew Barto and graduate student Stephen Giguere at UMass Amherst, Bruno Castro da Silva at the Federal University of Rio Grande del Sol, Brazil, and Emma Brunskill at Stanford University this week introduce a new framework for designing machine learning algorithms that make it easier for users of the algorithm to specify safety and fairness constraints. "We call algorithms created with our new framework'Seldonian' after Asimov's character Hari Seldon," Thomas explains.