Bias and Ethical Implications in AI

Lectures: Tu/Th 1:00 pm-2:15 pm @IS 305

Instructor: Xiang Lorraine Li

Office hours: Tu/Th 2:30 am-3:30 am or by appointment, 130 N Bellefield Ave, 517.

Email: [email protected] (Please use "CS2084" or “CS1684” at the beginning of the subject line when emailing.)

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Course Description

Artificial intelligence holds tremendous promise to benefit nearly all aspects of society, including healthcare, food production, the economy, education, security, the law, and even our personal activities. A big part of AI technologies involves natural language due to the rise of large language models, e.g., ChatGPT etc. As language technologies have become increasingly prevalent, there is a growing awareness that the decisions we make about our data, methods, and tools are often tied up with their impact on people and societies. This course introduces students to real-world applications of language technologies and the potential ethical implications associated with them. We discuss the philosophical foundations of ethical research along with advanced state-of-the-art techniques. Discussion topics include:

• Philosophical foundations: what is ethics, history, medical and psychological experiments, IRB and human subjects, ethical decision making.
• Misrepresentation and bias: algorithms to identify biases in models and data and adversarial approaches to debiasing.
• Privacy: algorithms for demographic inference, personality profiling, and anonymization of demographic and personal traits.
• Civility in communication: techniques to monitor trolling, hate speech, abusive language, cyberbullying, toxic comments.
• Democracy and the language of manipulation: approaches to identify propaganda and manipulation in the news, to identify fake news, political framing.

QA & Discussion:

Ed Discussion

Course Feedbacks (available during the semester )

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Textbook:

Speech and Language Processing (3rd edition draft) by Dan Jurafsky and James H. Martin

Course Schedule

Subject to change. All due dates are at 11:59pm ET except when indicated.