HUBweek 2017: Programming the Future of AI
Ethics, Governance, and Justice
Event Description
How do we prepare court systems, judges, lawyers, and defendants to interact with autonomous systems? What are the potential societal costs to human autonomy, dignity, and due process from the use of these systems in our judicial systems?
Harvard Law School Clinical Professor and Director of the Cyberlaw Clinic Chris Bavitz, along with Harvard's Cynthia Dwork, Christopher L. Griffin, Margo I. Seltzer, and Jonathan L. Zittrain, discuss the evolution of artificial intelligence, with an emphasis on ethics, governance, and criminal and social justice. Drawing from the research, community building, and educational efforts undertaken as part of our Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence initiative, leading experts in the field share and reflect on insights from ongoing activities related to the judiciary and fairness.
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Panelists
Cynthia Dwork
Radcliffe Alumnae Professor, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
Affiliated Faculty, Harvard Law School
Cynthia Dwork uses theoretical computer science to place societal problems on a firm mathematical foundation. She was awarded the Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in 2007 in recognition of some of her earliest work establishing the pillars on which every fault tolerant system has been built for a generation (Dwork, Lynch, and Stockmeyer, 1984). Her contributions to cryptography include the launching of non-malleable cryptography, the subfield of modern cryptography that studies -- and remedies -- the failures of cryptographic protocols to compose securely (Dolev, Dwork, and Naor, 1991). She is a co-inventor of the first public-key cryptosystem based on lattices, the current best bet for cryptographic constructions that will remain secure even against quantum computers (Ajtai and Dwork, 1997). More recently, Dwork spearheaded a successful effort to place privacy-preserving analysis of data on a firm mathematical foundation. A cornerstone of this effort is the invention of Differential Privacy (Dwork, McSherry, Nissim, and Smith, 2006, Dwork 2006), now the subject of intense activity in across many disciplines and recipient of the Theory of Cryptography Conference 2016 Test-of-Time award. With its introduction into Apple's iOS 10 (2016) and Google's Chrome browser (2014), differential privacy is just now beginning to be deployed on a global scale. Differentially private analyses enjoy a strong form of stability. One consequence is statistical validity under adaptive (aka exploratory) data analysis, which is of great value even when privacy is not itself a concern (Dwork, Feldman, Hardt, Pitassi, Reingold, and Roth 2014, 2015a, 2015b).
Data, algorithms, and systems have biases embedded within them reflecting designers' explicit and implicit choices, historical biases, and societal priorities. They form, literally and inexorably, a codification of values. Unfairness of algorithms -- for tasks ranging from advertising to recidivism prediction -- has recently attracted considerable attention in the popular press. Anticipating these concerns, Dwork initiated a formal study of fairness in classification (Dwork, Hardt, Pitassi, Reingold, and Zemel, 2012). Dwork is currently working in all of these last three areas (differential privacy, statistical validity in adaptive data analysis, and fairness in classification). Dwork was educated at Princeton and Cornell. She received her BSE (with honors) in electrical engineering and computer science at Princeton University, where she also received the Charles Ira Young Award for Excellence in Independent Research, the first woman ever to do so. She received her MSc and PhD degrees in computer science at Cornell University. Dwork is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the US National Academy of Engineering, and is a fellow of the ACM, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
Christopher L. Griffin
Research Director, Access to Justice Lab
Harvard Law School
Christopher L. Griffin. Jr. is the Research Director at the Access to Justice Lab at Harvard Law School. He earned his B.S. magna cum laude from Georgetown University, an MPhil in Economics at the University of Oxford, and his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was an Editor for the Yale Law Journal and Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Law & Policy Review. Prior to joining the A2J Lab, Chris taught at Duke Law School (2010-2012) and William & Mary Law School (2012-2016). In addition to court administration and procedure, his research interests include employment discrimination and judicial decision-making.
Margo I. Seltzer
Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science
John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University
Faculty Co-Director, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society
Margo I. Seltzer is a Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science and the Faculty Director for the Center for Research on Computation and Society in Harvard's John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Her research interests are in systems, construed quite broadly: systems for capturing and accessing provenance, file systems, databases, transaction processing systems, storage and analysis of graph-structured data, new architectures for parallelizing execution, and systems that apply technology to problems in healthcare.
She is the author of several widely-used software packages including database and transaction libraries and the 4.4BSD log-structured file system. Dr. Seltzer was a founder and CTO of Sleepycat Software, the makers of Berkeley DB, and is now an Architect at Oracle Corporation. She is a Sloan Foundation Fellow in Computer Science, an ACM Fellow, a Bunting Fellow, and was the recipient of the 1996 Radcliffe Junior Faculty Fellowship. She is recognized as an outstanding teacher and mentor, having received the Phi Beta Kappa teaching award in 1996, the Abrahmson Teaching Award in 1999, and the Capers and Marion McDonald Award for Excellence in Mentoring and Advising in 2010.
Professor Seltzer received an A.B. degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvard/Radcliffe College in 1983 and a Ph. D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1992.
Jonathan L. Zittrain
George Bemis Professor of International Law, Harvard Law School
Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources, Harvard Law School
Faculty Chair, Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society
Professor of Computer Science, John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University
Professor, Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government
Jonathan L. Zittrain is the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Director of the Harvard Law School Library, and Faculty Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. His research interests include battles for control of digital property and content, cryptography, electronic privacy, the roles of intermediaries within Internet architecture, human computing, and the useful and unobtrusive deployment of technology in education. He performed the first large-scale tests of Internet filtering in China and Saudi Arabia, and as part of the OpenNet Initiative co-edited a series of studies of Internet filtering by national governments: Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering; Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace; and Access Contested: Security, Identity, and Resistance in Asian Cyberspace.
He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Board of Advisors for Scientific American. He has served as a Trustee of the Internet Society, and as a Forum Fellow of the World Economic Forum, which named him a Young Global Leader, and as Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at the Federal Communications Commission, where he previously chaired the Open Internet Advisory Committee. His book The Future of the Internet -- And How to Stop It is available from Yale University Press and Penguin UK -- and under a Creative Commons license. Papers may be found at jz.org.
Moderator: Chris Bavitz
Christopher T. Bavitz is Managing Director of Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, based at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. He is also a Clinical Professor of Law at HLS, where he co-teaches the Counseling and Legal Strategy in the Digital Age seminar and teaches the seminar, Music & Digital Media. Chris concentrates his practice on intellectual property and media law, particularly in the areas of music, entertainment, and technology. He oversees many of the Clinic’s projects relating to copyright, speech, and advising of startups, and he serves as the HLS Dean’s Designate to Harvard’s Innovation Lab. Prior to joining the Clinic, Chris served as Senior Director of Legal Affairs for EMI Music North America. From 1998-2002, Chris was a litigation associate at Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal and RubinBaum LLP / Rubin Baum Levin Constant & Friedman, where he focused on copyright and trademark matters. Chris received his B.A., cum laude, from Tufts University in 1995 and his J.D. from University of Michigan Law School in 1998.