Montreal AI Ethics Institute suggests ways to counter bias in AI models

The Montreal AI Ethics Institute, a nonprofit research organization dedicated to defining humanity's place in an algorithm-driven world, today published the inaugural edition of its State of AI Ethics report. The 128-page multidisciplinary paper, which covers a set of areas spanning agency and responsibility, security and risk, and jobs and labor, aims to bring attention to key developments in the field of AI this past quarter. The State of AI Ethics first addresses the problem of bias in ranking and recommendation algorithms, like those used by Amazon to match customers with products they're likely to purchase. The authors note that while there are efforts to apply the notion of diversity to these systems, they usually consider the problem from an algorithmic perspective and strip it of cultural and contextual social meanings. "Demographic parity and equalized odds are some examples of this approach that apply the notion of social choice to score the diversity of data," the report reads.