Dr Deepak Padmanabhan enthralls @IIT-PKD with “Fairness in AI: Where AI meets Politics”.
The Institute community was treated to a lucid and well-informed inter-disciplinary exposition that encouraged a critical look at AI at a high-level, the various kinds of implicit assumptions that go into data-driven AI, and the imperative to break disciplinary silos. Set in the context of the present times where formal education unfortunately encourages "knowing more and more about less and less", the talk touched upon distributed agency of decision making in ML, data and predictability, how biases operate, and 'Math snobbery' followed by discussion on two streams of political conceptualizations of fairness within fair AI literature. The popular science lecture sprinkled with relatable examples and carefully curated references to Mark Twain, Thomas Hobbes, John Rawls, Micheal Sandel, B.R Ambedkar and M.K Gandhi sparked ample thought and discussion from among the audience.
Dr Deepak Padmanabhan is an Associate Professor of computer science at Queen's University Belfast, and adjunct faculty at IIT Madras. He has authored 100+ papers, 12+ patents, authored/edited three books, all in various areas of data analytics and AI. His current interests are on fairness in AI/ML, particularly focusing on approaching questions of AI fairness from a philosophically informed perspective. He has a keen interest in public communication of science, and has authored several popular media articles on the politics and ethics of technology. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and the ACM. The department of Computer Science and Engineering organised this Invited Research Talk at 10am in the Ahalia Campus Auditorium.
