Jane Fountain, Distinguished Professor and Director of the School of Public Policy, recently delivered an invited talk titled “The Moon and the Ghetto: AI, Computational Algorithms and the Challenges of Systemic Bias in Public Administration and Management,” at the conference AI and Society: Government, Policy, and the Law, hosted by the Truman School of Government and Public Affairs and the University of Missouri Law School. The conference brought together interdisciplinary scholars on democracy, government regulation of AI, creating an AI-knowledgeable public sector, and future directions in research.
Fountain’s invited talk focused on the challenges involved in removing systemic biases with respect to race, ethnicity and related attributes from large-scale datasets and the computational algorithms developed from those data. She outlined problematic outcomes in models used in predictive policing, healthcare decision making, education and related domains and provided examples of innovative approaches to mitigating against discriminatory biases.