Becoming Responsible Gatekeepers

Title: Becoming Responsible Gatekeepers

Speaker: Delip Rao

Abstract: ML practitioners and advocates are increasingly finding themselves becoming gatekeepers of the modern world. The models you create have power to get people arrested or vindicated, get loans approved or rejected, determine what interest rate should be charged for such loans, who should be shown to you in your long list of pursuits on your Tinder, what news do you read, who gets called for a job phone screen or even a college admission... the list goes on. My goal in this talk is to summarize the kinds of disparate outcomes that are caused by cargo cult machine learning, and recent academic efforts to address some of them.

Bio: Delip Rao (http://deliprao.com/) is the founder of Joostware (http://joostware.com/), a San Francisco based AI product development and consulting company. His research background is in Natural Language Processing, and scalable ML algorithms. Prior to founding Joostware, he worked on NLP research and products at Google Research, Twitter, and Amazon (Echo).

Lightning Talk: Understanding Publisher and User Political Orientations Using SmartNews Data

Shunan Zhang is part of the Machine Learning and Data Science team at SmartNews, one of the largest mobile news aggregators. She’ll show how simple machine learning methods (such as PCA and model-based clustering) reveal informative results, when applied to user behavioral data.

Tentative Schedule:

6:30pm – 7:00pm Pre-reception
7:00pm – 7:15pm Lightning Presentation
7:20pm – 8:20pm Main Talk
8:20pm – 9:00pm Post-reception

Special Thanks: Smartnews for hosting!

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