Ethics at NeurIPS 2020 — A small collection of resources
Social causes and inclusivity are continuing to be normalized at major tech conferences, and NeurIPS was no exception this year.
Fresh off of front-page news in tech-ethics with the controversial set of events surrounding renowned ethical leader Timnit Gebru from Google’s ethical AI team, the annual AI & Computer Science mega-conference Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) would take place. 2020 in America had already seen significant social discontent following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police and subsequent protests and legislative reform efforts.
NeurIPS provided several platforms upon which to engage the nexus of technology and society — while listing all workshops below (See NeurIPS schedule), I would particularly not the culmination of these efforts into what would become the Resistance.AI Workshop.
Resistance.AI Workshop
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/resistance-ai-neurips-20
NeurIPS: https://neurips.cc/virtual/2020/protected/workshop_16151.html
Collective Resource Shared Document: a crowdsourced collection of links and resources brought up during the Workshop
Links
- Black in AI https://blackinai2020.vercel.app/
- Latinx in AI https://www.latinxinai.org/
- Data for Black Lives https://d4bl.org/
- Queer in AI https://sites.google.com/view/queer-in-ai/
- Disabled in STEM https://disabledinstem.wordpress.com/
- No Tech for ICE https://notechforice.com/
Other Highlights
Dr. Ramon Amaro’s fireside chat at the Black in AI workshop was a particular standout for it’s historical depth and breadth. Amaro went back to the sociopolitical atmosphere of G.W. Leibniz when he was creating his uses and interpretations of Calculus, as well as other figures like Thomas Malthus at the roots of various economic & social theories to which advances in mathematics and statistics would be applied.
Amaro’s upcoming book seems like an important compliment to works like Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology, which was noted in Erik Brynjolfsson’s tweet of Stanford Human-Centered AI’s book recommendations.
Did you have any favorite social/ethical moments from NeurIPS2020? Let us know in the comments below.
