Nov 1 Cafe – The humanity of Artificial Intelligence

East Bay Science Cafe

The humanity of Artificial Intelligence

with R.Stuart Geiger

Wednesday November 1, 2017 at 7:00 PM
Restaurant Valparaiso, 1403 Solano Ave. Albany
Today, “artificial intelligence” seems to be everywhere — in our phones, vacuums, hospitals, and inboxes — but it can be hard to separate science fiction from science fact. Many discussions about AI imagine a fully autonomous superintelligence that designs itself with little to no human intervention, making decisions in ways that humans cannot possibly understand. Yet the work of designing, developing, engineering, training, and testing such systems requires a massive amount of human labor, which is typically erased when such systems are released as products. In this talk, Dr. Geiger will give a human-centered, behind-the-scenes introduction to machine learning, illustrating the creative, interpretive, and often messy work humans do to make autonomous agents work. Understanding the humanity behind artificial intelligence is important if we want to think constructively about issues of bias, fairness, accountability, and transparency in AI.
Artifical Intelligence

The humanity of artificial intelligence

 
Stuart Geiger

Stuart Geiger

“Hi! I’m Stuart Geiger, an ethnographer and post-doctoral scholar at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science at UC-Berkeley. I’m an interpretive social scientist by training with a background in the humanities, but I have just enough expertise in computer science and data science to make trouble. As an ethnographer, I use many different qualitative, quantitative, and computational methods to holistically study and analyze technology and culture, while trying to uphold two goals: 1) to do research while embedded in the social worlds I study, and 2) to understand the worldviews and perspectives of the people I study. I call myself an ethnographer of computation and a computational ethnographer, because I study people as they build, support, interact with, and relate to computational systems, as well as use computational (and other) methods in my own work.” http://stuartgeiger.com/

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