'Let there be light' Shining a torch on the ethics of AI

Here at GFT we’re excited to be holding our first official meetup.
For our first meetup we'll be looking at the ethics of AI.

Our guest speaker, Dr Alex Allan from Kortical, will be looking at why in the age of GDPR it is so important to be able to ‘explain’ how AI solutions make their predictions.

Dr Alex Allan is the co-founder of Kortical, an AI company that has developed a platform made to accelerate the build, ‘explainability’ and deployment of AI models. https://kortical.com

He will be looking at :
'Opening the black box: AI with ‘explainability’

The lack of "explainability" around AI is such a serious problem that the European Union addressed it in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) mandating EU citizens have the "right to a human review" of any decisions about them that are based on an algorithm

Dr. Alex Allan will present on why being able to ‘explain’ how AI solutions make their predictions is so important. He will look at:

1. If how a model makes a decision can’t be seen, it can be hard to see how it can be improved.
2. Removing bias from algorithms. Companies carry a lot of reputational risk using black box models without understanding how they work.
3. Enterprise stakeholders are generally risk averse and so are unlikely to sign off on a decision-making process that is a “black box”
4. Complying with GDPR. Every European citizen has the right to an explanation of any algorithm based decision.

Speaking alongside Dr Allan are our own experts, Maciej Nowicki from GFT Poland and Pawel Laskowski from GFT London who will be exploring ethics in Data Science, biases in ML/AI and how to overcome them.

Their talk is on:

Ethics in Data Science - Biases in ML/AI and how to avoid them

In a world surrounded by predictive algorithms affecting some of the most important decisions of our lives such as school admission, credit approval or job hunting, conversation about ethics of such algorithms is more important than ever.

Our GFT engineers will be questioning in this context whether machine ethics exist and if they should be taken seriously, demonstrating how biases creep into the everyday work of data scientists, and give recommendations on how to avoid them in accordance with current scientific literature.

Maciej Nowicki leads the AI Practice in GFT Poland and is responsible for AI/ML project management and increasing capability in this area.

Pawel Laskowski is a Lead Cloud Solutions Architect at GFT with most of his time spent working on cloud enablement in the financial sector where he helps clients with cloud adoption.