Bias and Ethical Implications in AI

Lectures: Tu/Th 1:00 pm-2:15 pm @IS 819

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.

Grader: Rr. Nefrianna

Office hours: Thursday noon-1pm via zoom

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.

Tools:

In class tool: Tophat

Questions and Class Pools: Ed

Slides and Assignment will be on Canvas

Course Feedbacks (available during the semester )

Anonymous Google Form

Course Schedule

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

Schedule