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Algorithms: Explanations, Blame and Trust

“Algorithms” haven’t had the best press recently. So it’s been fascinating to hear from the ReEnTrust project, which actually started back in 2018, on Rebuilding and Enabling Trust in Algorithms. Their recent presentations have  looked at explanations, but not (mostly) the mathematical ones that are often the focus. Rather than trying to reverse engineer a […]

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Bias Bounties

So many “AI ethics frameworks” are crossing my browser nowadays that I’m only really keeping an eye out for things that I’ve not seen before. The Government’s new “Ethics, Transparency and Accountability Framework for Automated Decision-Making” has one of those: actively seeking out ways that an AI decision-making system can go wrong. The terminology makes […]

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Draft AI Regulation: thinking about risks

The European Commission has just published its draft Regulation on Artificial Intelligence (AI). While there’s no obligation for UK law to follow suit, the Regulation provides a helpful guide to risk from different applications of AI, and the sort of controls that might be required. What “AI” is covered? According to Article 3(1) [with sub-clauses […]

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An (organisational) framework for ethical AI

One striking aspect of the new Ethical Framework for AI in Education is how little of it is actually about AI technology. The Framework has nine objectives and 33 criteria: 18 of these apply to the ‘pre-procurement’ stage, and another five to ‘monitoring and evaluation’. That’s a refreshing change from the usual technology-led discussions in […]

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Presentations

Towards Ethical AI

My Digifest talk yesterday developed a couple of ideas on how we might move Towards Ethical AI, at least as that is defined by the EU High-Level Experts Group. First is that three of the HLEG’s four Principles, and at least five of their seven Requirements, look strikingly similar to the requirements when processing personal […]

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Where is “AI ethics”?

One of the trickiest questions I’m being asked at the moment is about “the ethics of Artificial Intelligence”. Not, I think, because it is necessarily a hard question, but because it’s so ill-defined. Indeed a couple of discussions at Digifest yesterday made me wonder whether it’s the simply the wrong question to start with. First, […]

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Learning in (and from) the pandemic

Priya Lakhani’s Digifest keynote was titled “How COVID-19 has catalysed edtech adoption” but actually ranged much more widely. What has the pandemic shown us about the role of technology in education and, indeed, how does that relate to education’s role in future society. One obvious result of the pandemic is that we have (nearly) all […]

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AI Training: Adequate, Relevant and not Excessive!

It’s still common to hear stories where privacy is supposedly in conflict with other objectives. I’ve been writing for years about how that’s not the case in security or access management. This morning’s ICO webinar on Security and Data Minimisation in Artificial Intelligence came up with a counter-example in that field, too… You might think […]

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Improving security and privacy with AI

Two talks at last week’s FIRST conference looked at how Artificial Intelligence might be used in incident response. In both cases, the use of AI improves user privacy directly – by reducing or eliminating the need for human responders to look at user data – and also indirectly, by producing faster detection and mitigation of […]

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Sandbox Tales: Machine Learning

The latest reports from the ICO sandbox provide important clarification of how data protection law applies to, and can guide, the application of novel technologies. This post looks at machine learning… Onfido’s engagement looked at how to train and review the performance of machine learning models. In thinking about that I’d concluded that the GDPR […]