Please join us for Jake Metcalf’s tech talk, entitled “Moral Ontologies of Machine Learning and the Problem of Domain Skipping,” on Thursdsay April 25th at 3 PM in the Knight Browsing Room. Jake will also participate in a day-long event, entitled “Neuroscience, Ethics, & Law in an Era of Big Data,” in the Knight Law School (141) on Friday April 26th.

Jacob (Jake) Metcalf is a data ethics researcher and consultant, focused on the adapting the conceptual frameworks, policies and institutional practices of research ethics to the methods of data science and machine learning. He is a Researcher at Data & Society where he is a co-PI on the PERVADE research team and the co-founder of the technology ethics consulting firm, Ethical Resolve. For more on the specifics of his talk for the NMCC, see the abstract below.

“Moral Ontologies of Machine Learning and the Problem of Domain Skipping”

Abstract: One of the primary patterns we see in AI/ML ethics is that the technical/mathematical structures behind ML cause algorithms to jump domains in a way that causes trouble for our lived experience. A machine doesn’t know the difference between health and consumer data, and ML will always seek to bundle everything under a single, flattened ontology. However, we experience moral problems as having a topology — we experience shopping and doctors notes a meaningfully different and expect computers to respect that.