Related papers: The "given data" paradigm undermines both cultures
In this paper, we examine how generative machine learning systems produce a new politics of visual culture. We focus on DALL-E 2 and related models as an emergent approach to image-making that operates through the cultural techniques of…
Financial companies continuously analyze the state of the markets to rethink and adjust their investment strategies. While the analysis is done on the digital form of data, decisions are often made based on graphical representations in…
Social norms and conventions are commonly accepted and adopted behaviors and practices within a social group that guide interactions -- e.g., how to spell a word or how to greet people -- and are central to a group's culture and identity.…
As the diversity of people in higher education grows, Universities are struggling to provide inclusive environments that nurture the spirit of free inquiry in the presence of these differences. At the extreme, the value of diversity is…
Modern statistical learning techniques have often emphasized prediction performance over interpretability, giving rise to "black box" models that may be difficult to understand, and to generalize to other settings. We conceptually divide a…
Social discrimination seems to be a persistent phenomenon in many cultures. It is important to understand the mechanisms that lead people to judge others by the group to which they belong, rather than individual qualities. It was recently…
There are both benefits and drawbacks to cultural diversity. It can lead to friction and exacerbate differences. However, as with biological diversity, cultural diversity is valuable in times of upheaval; if a previously effective solution…
In the last years many accurate decision support systems have been constructed as black boxes, that is as systems that hide their internal logic to the user. This lack of explanation constitutes both a practical and an ethical issue. The…
Understanding the dynamics of opinions, preferences and of culture as whole requires more use of empirical data than has been done so far. It is clear that an important role in driving this dynamics is played by social influence, which is…
Machine learning models are becoming increasingly popular in different types of settings. This is mainly caused by their ability to achieve a level of predictive performance that is hard to match by human experts in this new era of big…
Recent research has helped to cultivate growing awareness that machine learning systems fueled by big data can create or exacerbate troubling disparities in society. Much of this research comes from outside of the practicing data science…
A central goal in social science is to evaluate the causal effect of a policy. One dominant approach is through panel data analysis in which the behaviors of multiple units are observed over time. The information across time and space…
As artificial intelligence is increasingly affecting all parts of society and life, there is growing recognition that human interpretability of machine learning models is important. It is often argued that accuracy or other similar…
With the increasing adoption of predictive models trained using machine learning across a wide range of high-stakes applications, e.g., health care, security, criminal justice, finance, and education, there is a growing need for effective…
When a model informs decisions about people, distribution shifts can create undue disparities. However, it is hard for external entities to check for distribution shift, as the model and its training set are often proprietary. In this…
We consider the problem of distinguishing between two arbitrary black-box distributions defined over the domain [n], given access to $s$ samples from both. It is known that in the worst case O(n^{2/3}) samples is both necessary and…
Probabilistic numerics casts numerical tasks, such the numerical solution of differential equations, as inference problems to be solved. One approach is to model the unknown quantity of interest as a random variable, and to constrain this…
Big data is one of the most discussed, and possibly least understood, terms in use in business today. Big data is said to offer not only unprecedented levels of business intelligence concerning the habits of consumers and rivals, but also…
Critical decisions in hiring, college admissions, and credit lending are guided by predictions made in the presence of uncertainty. While uncertainty imparts errors across all demographic groups, this paper shows that the types of errors…
Nowadays new technologies, and especially artificial intelligence, are more and more established in our society. Big data analysis and machine learning, two sub-fields of artificial intelligence, are at the core of many recent breakthroughs…