An archive of data science, data analytics, data engineering, machine learning, and artificial intelligence writing from the former Towards Data Science Medium publication.
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How Technology Shapes Society
And why computer science needs help from the humanities
About nine months ago, I applied for the GRFP — a PhD fellowship from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
In the application, I proposed to research how computer scientists encode ethics and values into machine learning algorithms, and how ML designers can better understand the societal implications of their design choices.
For example, if an ML engineer designs a decision-making system to be more fair, what definition of fairness are they using? What evaluation metrics are they choosing to optimize for? And what are the societal consequences of choosing one metric or definition over another?
I proposed to research the potential harm of algorithmically-embedded social issues like value tradeoffs and what to do in the event of a value conflict when designing an ML system.
My application was rejected.
Yesterday, I received comments from the three academics who reviewed my proposal. All of their feedback was positive; with the exception of one sentence:
“This appears to be more of a social study than a CS project.” — Reviewer #2
Published in TDS Archive
An archive of data science, data analytics, data engineering, machine learning, and artificial intelligence writing from the former Towards Data Science Medium publication.
Written by Jessie J. Smith
PhD Student, Researching and Creating Technical Solutions to Ethical Problems in Society. Talking about AI Ethics at