The Human Element in Machine Learning with Prof. Catherine D’Ignazio, Prof. Jacob Andreas & Harini Suresh

When computer science was in its infancy, programmers quickly realized that though computers are astonishingly powerful tools, the results they achieve are only as good as the data you feed into them. (This principle was quickly formalized as GIGO: “Garbage In, Garbage Out.”) What was true in the era of the UNIVAC has proved still to be true in the era of machine learning: among other well-publicized AI fiascos, chatbots that have interacted with bigots have learned to spew racist invective, while facial-recognition software trained solely on images of white people sometimes fails to recognize people of color as human. In this episode, we meet Prof. Catherine D’Ignazio of MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) and Prof. Jacob Andreas and Harini Suresh of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. In 2021, D’Ignazio, Andreas, and Suresh collaborated as part of the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing initiative from the Schwarzman College of Computing in a project to teach computer science students in 6.864 Natural Language Processing to recognize how deep learning systems can replicate and magnify the biases inherent in the data sets that are used to train them. Relevant Resources:MIT OpenCourseWareThe OCW Educator PortalShare your teaching insightsSocial and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) resource on OpenCourseWareCase Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of ComputingSERC websiteProfessor D’Ignazio’s faculty pageProfessor Andreas’s faculty pageHarini Suresh’s personal websiteDesmond Patton’s paper on analysis of communications on TwitterMusic in this episode by Blue Dot SessionsConnect with UsIf you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you! Call us @ 617-715-2517On our siteOn FacebookOn TwitterOn InstagramStay CurrentSubscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.Support OCWIf you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseWare, donate to help keep those programs going!CreditsSarah Hansen, host and producer Brett Paci, producer  Dave Lishansky, producer Script writing assistance by Aubrey CalawayShow notes by Peter Chipman Connect with UsIf you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you! Call us @ 617-715-2517On our siteOn FacebookOn XOn InstagramOn LinkedInStay CurrentSubscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter. Support OCWIf you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going! CreditsSarah Hansen, host and producer Brett Paci, producer  Dave Lishansky, producer Jackson Maher, producerShow notes by Peter Chipman