Reflections on the transformative potential of refusal as a method in the design of technology — Last year at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), one of the most well-respected computer science conferences in the world, the opening panel discussion on A.I. for social good didn’t go quite as people might have expected. “I’m not usually in spaces like this, and I’m not entirely…

On January 28, 2020, I presented a paper at the ACM FAccT* conference. Below is the write-up of that presentation. You can find the paper here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3351095.3372859 Einstein once said that if he had an hour to solve a problem and his life depended on the solution, he would spend…

On December 14, 2019 I gave an invited talk at the “Fair ML for Health” workshop at NeurIPS. Below is a write-up of that talk. You can watch the talk here: https://slideslive.com/38922104/fair-ml-in-healthcare-3?t=3848s It’s time for us to move beyond “bias” as the anchor point for our efforts to build ethical…

Inclusion and diversity are both part of our core mission at the MIT Media Lab Digital Currency Initiative. …

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” — Martin Luther King Jr. Studies have shown time and again that implicit bias continues…

The next conversation we need to have about diversity in tech  — A couple of weeks ago Google released stats on the demographic makeup of its employees. The numbers weren’t great, but the release did produce a helpful domino effect in the industry, as other major tech companies like Linkedin and Yahoo subsequently also came clean about the disproportionate slice of the…