Cyber Alliance and AI Researchers Adam Smith and Ran Canetti Mentioned in an Article on “Improving AI Fairness”

Earlier this week VentureBeat.com wrote an article entitled “Boston University Researchers Develop Framework to Improve AI Fairness.” In the article, a research paper called, “From Soft Classifiers to Hard Decisions: How Fair Can We Be?” is highlighted for the explanation of how we are trusting AI algorithms to make critical decisions sometimes unfairly. This is especially concerning if the decision is a crucial one like a mortgage approval, job placement or even more so, prison time.   

Adam Smith, BU Professor of Computer Science and Engineering said, “We were curious to know whether, if risk scores are somehow behaving similarly on two populations, can they be used to make decisions that are fair or unbiased? The short answer is no. Even if your risk score satisfies these notions of calibration, it still may be impossible to make decisions based on that score that satisfy various equalized error criteria.” To solve this, they developed different approaches to evaluate risk scores that can help to reduce false positives and negatives to show more fairness toward different groups of people.

Ran Canetti, BU Professor of Computer Science and co-author of the paper elaborated that they changed the automated decision-maker to identify certain cases as uncertain when risk scores were close to decision thresholds. He added, “In the technique we developed, we allow the post-processing algorithm to introduce uncertainty. Sometimes, it can say that it can’t decide on a particular case.”    

Both Adam Smith and Ran Canetti are part of the BU Cyber Alliance, which is a collaboration between computer science researchers and law professors. This group is part of the Center for Reliable Information Systems & Cyber Security (RISCS) which is housed at the Hariri Institute for Computing at Boston University, where it’s mission is to promote discovery and innovations through the use of computational and data-driven approaches. For more information on the BU Cyber Alliance, contact hicadmin@bu.edu or visit www.bu.edu/hic/cyber-alliance/

Article Link: https://bit.ly/2GdkpOY