The Good Robot Podcast: featuring Su Lin Blodgett

Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry Mackereth, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology. In this episode, Microsoft Senior Researcher Su Lin Blodgett explores whether you can use AI to measure discrimination, why AI can never be de-biased, and how AI shows us that categories like gender and race are not as clear cut as we think they are. Su Lin is a senior researcher in the Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics in AI (FATE) group at Microsoft Research Montréal. She is broadly interested in examining the social and ethical implications of natural language processing technologies, and develops approaches for anticipating, measuring, and mitigating harms arising from language technologies, focusing on the complexities of language and language technologies in their social contexts, and on supporting NLP practitioners in their ethical work. She has also worked on using NLP approaches to examine language variation and change (computational sociolinguistics), for example developing models to identify language variation on social media.