Policy Field Notes: NIPS Update

By Jack Clark and Tim Hwang. 

Conversations about the social impact of AI often are very abstract, focusing on broad generalizations about technology rather than talking about the specific state of the research field. That makes it challenging to have a full conversation about what good public policy regarding AI would be like. In the interest of helping to bridge that gap, Jack Clark and I have been playing around with doing recaps that’ll take a selection of papers from a recent conference and talk about the longer term policy implications of the work. This one covers papers that appeared at NIPS 2016.

If it’s helpful to the community, we’ll plan to roll out similar recaps throughout 2017 — with the next one being ICLR in April.

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Machine Learning Meets Policy: Reflections on HUML 2016

Last Friday, the University of Ca’ Foscari in Venice organized an IEEE workshop on the Human Use of Machine Learning (HUML 2016). The workshop, held at the European Centre for Living Technology, hosted roughly 30 participants and broadly addressed the social impacts and ethical problems stemming from the wide-spread use of machine learning.

HUML joins a growing number workshops for critical voices in the ML community. These include Fairness, Accountability and Transparency in Machine Learning (FAT-ML), the #Data4Good at ICML 2016, and Human Interpretability of Machine Learning (WHI), held this year at ICML and Interpretable ML for Complex Systems, held this year at NIPS. Among this company, HUML was notable especially notable for diversity of perspectives. While FAT-ML, DS4Good and WHI featured presentations primarily by members of the machine learning community, HUML brought together scholars from philosophy of science, law, predictive policing, and  machine learning.

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