Code Review for Community Change

On this episode of Talking Machines we take a break from our regular format to talk about the “code review of community culture” that the AI, ML, Stats and Computer Science fields in general need to undergo. In a blog post, that was put up shortly after NIPS, researcher Kristian Lum outlined several instances of sexual harassment and abuse of power. In her post she mentioned Brad Carlin and a person who she referred to as S. We learned in reporting done by Bloomberg that S was Steven Scott, who was at Google. As of this posing Carlin is under investigation and Scott has left Google after being suspended. Today we pause in our regular format to talk about how we, as a community, can change. Full disclosure: Neil and Katherine served as press chairs for NIPS 2017. They will hold the same post for ICML 2018 and NIPS 2018 and are working along with the other organizers of these events to effect change around these issues.