“The Challenges of Audits, Accountability & Algorithmic Justice”

Abstract: As its popularity and proliferation increase, AI tools are slowly and surely making their way into our everyday lives. However, as its use becomes widespread, we continue to encounter failures that are becoming harder to explain – and hold decision makers accountable for. In this talk, rather than discussing the solutions to these harms, I hope to shed some light on the nature of the problems we face with algorithmic deployments, and the challenges of ensuring accountability and algorithmic justice.

Deborah is a Mozilla fellow, interested in topics of algorithmic auditing and evaluation. She has worked closely with the Algorithmic Justice League initiative on several award-winning projects to highlight cases of bias in computer vision. She has also worked with Google’s Ethical AI team and been a research fellow at the Partnership on AI and AI Now Institute at New York University working on various projects to operationalize ethical considerations in ML engineering practice.

This event is part of the 2nd Season of the Feminist and Accessible Publishing and Communications Technologies Speaker and Workshop Series (https://www.feministandaccessiblepublishingandtechnology.com), organized by Dr. Alex Ketchum. This series was made possible thanks to our sponsors: SSHRC (and the Initiative for Digital Citizen Research), the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (IGSF), Milieux, Initiative for Indigenous Futures, Algorithmic Media Observatory, MILA, Cinema Politics, McGill’s Department of History and Classical Studies, Black Feminist Futures Working Group, the Sustainability Projects Fund, Moving Image Research Laboratory, The McGill Writing Centre, MUTEK IMG, the Intersectionality Research Hub, and Machine Agencies.
There is no fee required to attend this event. We will provide captions. The event will be recorded and the video will be made available on our website within a few days of the event