Sessions | Absolutely Interdisciplinary

Redrawing data boundaries

Date/Time: June 21, 2022 | 11:45 AM – 12:45 PM ET

Moderator: Lisa Austin

Speakers: Eric Horvitz, Aziz Z. Huq, Robert Seamans, Pamela Snively

Companies have many incentives to draw fences and boundaries around the data they collect and process, whether for use in training AI models or other purposes. These boundaries can be legally constructed with a variety of tools, including intellectual property rights, privacy rights, and contracts. Should we instead be developing rights of public access to this data? Or recognize that some of this data should be a public resource? When this data is data about persons how can we also respect the interests of data subjects?

Explanation and justification in AI

Date/Time: June 21, 2022 | 12:45 PM – 2:00 PM ET

Moderator: Philippe-André Rodriguez

Speakers: Boris Babic, Finale Doshi-Velez

Modern machine learning systems are often large and complex, making it difficult to understand why they do what they do. This “black box” problem raises challenges when AI systems are used to make or contribute to important decisions such as what medical treatments to adopt, whether to grant bail to someone pending criminal trial, or how to distribute public benefits. The call for AI to be “explainable” has thus been mounting for several years and a “right to explanation” is beginning to appear in proposed legislation governing AI. This call has spurred computer scientists to develop methods to provide accounts of what factors produce or influence an AI decision. But are such accounts the only kinds of explanations we need if AI is to play a significant role in our societies? Do we need explanation, or do we need justification? We look for justification from decision makers such as judges and regulators—an account of the reasons that show that a decision is consistent with governing rules and principles. What insights might we gain about how to build trustworthy and accountable systems from what we know about justification in legal and regulatory domains?

Natural and artificial social learning

Date/Time: June 21, 2022 | 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM ET

Moderator: Sheila McIlraith

Speakers: Natasha Jaques, Jennifer Nagel

Social learning is powerful: agents that can learn from each other typically outperform similar agents who must go it alone. Across the animal kingdom, social learning takes many forms, ranging from emulation to gaze following to deliberate signalling. Human social cognition is particularly remarkable: unlike other animals, we query and correct each other, and work together to build a shared understanding of reality. But how exactly are we able to manage this, and why is it so helpful to distribute problem-solving among multiple agents? New research in artificial intelligence is generating insight into these questions, by developing algorithms which attempt to endow AI agents with social learning abilities, and studying what incentives can improve social abilities like cooperation in AI. This session looks at how social learning can help us build better AI and what insights we can gain from those AI systems about one of the most remarkable features of natural intelligence.

Digital constitutionalism and the futures of digital governance

Date/Time: June 22, 2022 | 11:45 AM – 12:45 PM ET

Speaker: Anna Su

The rise of the information society and the ubiquity of digital technologies in our lives brings new challenges for digital governance. Traditional institutions, processes, and even rights that were previously helpful in grappling with societal transformations might not be sufficient to address the variety of complex ethical and legal issues emerging from the development and use of these technologies, such as the emergence of technology corporations acting as private sovereigns. This talk explores the phenomenon of digital constitutionalism, in which various norms, laws, regulations and principles are now being articulated in order to limit the exercise of power—whatever the source—- and to balance those powers in the digital realm. In particular, I look at how an updated international human rights law can be a unique and important tool, no matter what the future of digital governance looks like. 

Collective agency in evolution and AI

Date/Time: June 22, 2022 | 12:45 PM – 2:00 PM ET

Moderator: Denis Walsh

Speakers: Kate Larson, Richard Watson

This session will focus on collective forms of agency through an integration of perspectives from multi-agent AI and theoretical evolutionary biology, in order to investigate the scope for reciprocal illumination between the disciplines of AI and evolutionary theory. When is a collection of agents a collective agent? What can the evolution of collective agency in natural agents teach us about the design of artificial agents, and what can the experience of designing artificial agents teach us about our own evolution? How does collective agency evolve, and how do the possibilities of collective agency shape and drive evolution in their turn?

Building democratic social choice into recommender systems

Date/Time: June 22, 2022 | 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM ET

Moderator: Peter Loewen

Speakers: Taylor Owen, Jonathan Stray

Recommender systems are powerful, machine learning-based algorithms help us filter the digital landscape, deciding what content we see on our social media feeds, what movies and music are suggested to us, and what search results we encounter online. The recommender systems which drive social media platforms have been built through employing metrics of how users behave and engage online. What if users and/or public servants were given the opportunity to have a role in the design of these recommender systems? How could different methods of consultation and design—whether through expert consultations or citizen juries—improve the design of recommender systems. More broadly, how can we democratize the design of recommender systems?

Sessions | SRI Graduate Workshop

Technologies of trust

As accelerated technological change alters our society's methods of generating, recording, and communicating information, what does this mean for trust, and what role does trust play in developing and deploying these technologies?

Understanding trust across disciplines is critical to comprehending our world's social, political, and economic dimensions, and how we might work to improve them. SRI's mission to align technology with human values raises the question of how to cultivate appropriate trust in technology so that we can deploy it safely, effectively, and ethically into the world. To that end, debates on trust are needed.

Understanding trust in the modern world requires diverse fields to work together in thinking about the foundational building blocks of trust, and how these might be promoted in practice. How do we define trust? How are trust and truth related? Is trust necessary for morality? When is trust in technology warranted or unwarranted? What makes a system trustworthy and what are the implications for system design? Who arbitrates trust, or can it be decentralized? What are the consequences of misplaced trust or distrust? How could new and emerging technologies impact societal trust?

Session 1 | 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM ET

Moderator: Vinyas Harish (Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto)

Zihan (Ellis) Gao and Radhika Prabhune, Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology, University of Toronto, “Patient perspectives on the use of artificial intelligence in healthcare: A scoping review”

Kamilah Ebrahim, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, “Designing trust in COVID-19 technologies in urban contexts”

Kamilah Ebrahim and Erina Moon, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, “Building algorithms that work for everyone: Natural language processing tools for bias reduction in child welfare systems”

Kimberly Crasta and Sai-Amrit Maharaj, Translational Research Program, LMP, University of Toronto, “The influence of inter-institutional communication on healthcare delivery: Impacts on patient quality of care and trust in the healthcare system”

Session 2 | 12:30 PM – 2:30 PM ET

Moderator: Morgan MacInnes (Department of Political Science, University of Toronto)

Yisheng Li, Ted Rogers School of Management, Toronto Metropolitan University, “Algorithmic homophily, conspiracy theory, and social media”

Randeep Nota, OISE, University of Toronto, “Online proctoring: AI, privacy, and ‘cop sh*t‘“

Alice Huang, Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto, “Subjective calibration and the meta-expertise of experts”

Alexander Brechalov, Donnelly Center for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, University of Toronto, “Trustworthy NLP tools for scientific document analysis”