Learning Ecosystems

Can you make AI fairer than a judge? Play our courtroom algorithm game — from technologyreview.com by Karen Hao and Jonathan Stray
Play our courtroom algorithm game The US criminal legal system uses predictive algorithms to try to make the judicial process less biased. But there’s a deeper problem.

Excerpt:

As a child, you develop a sense of what “fairness” means. It’s a concept that you learn early on as you come to terms with the world around you. Something either feels fair or it doesn’t.

But increasingly, algorithms have begun to arbitrate fairness for us. They decide who sees housing ads, who gets hired or fired, and even who gets sent to jail. Consequently, the people who create them—software engineers—are being asked to articulate what it means to be fair in their code. This is why regulators around the world are now grappling with a question: How can you mathematically quantify fairness? 

This story attempts to offer an answer. And to do so, we need your help. We’re going to walk through a real algorithm, one used to decide who gets sent to jail, and ask you to tweak its various parameters to make its outcomes more fair. (Don’t worry—this won’t involve looking at code!)

The algorithm we’re examining is known as COMPAS, and it’s one of several different “risk assessment” tools used in the US criminal legal system.

But whether algorithms should be used to arbitrate fairness in the first place is a complicated question. Machine-learning algorithms are trained on “data produced through histories of exclusion and discrimination,” writes Ruha Benjamin, an associate professor at Princeton University, in her book Race After Technology. Risk assessment tools are no different. The greater question about using them—or any algorithms used to rank people—is whether they reduce existing inequities or make them worse.

You can also see change in these articles as well:

• Legal Innovation – It’s Not Just For Big Law — from artificiallawyer.com
  Say the words ‘legal innovation’ and Big Law firms often come to mind. But, the reality is that the firms genuinely focused on innovation and leveraging legal tech to improve how they deliver legal services is a rapidly widening group, and far beyond just the massive global firms.
• PwC Legal Arm Partners With Contract Startup ThoughtRiver — from by Simon Lock
  The agreement will see PwC launch pre-screening products for clients in collaboration with ThoughtRiver by the first quarter of 2020.
• Artificial Intelligence Is on the Case in the Legal Profession — from observer.com by Harmon Leon
  Artificial intelligence (AI) is, in fact, becoming a mainstay component of the legal profession. In some circumstances, this analytics-crunching technology is using algorithms and machine learning to do work that was previously done by entry-level lawyers.
• KPMG Legal Expands in Eastern Europe by Absorbing Tech-Centric Law Firm — from by Varsha Patel
  KPMG absorbed Fernbach & Partners in a move to create “the leading technology, IP and privacy practice in Romania”.