Description:

Abstract: In criminal justice, housing, lending, and other areas that irreversibly affect people’s lives, decisions (or at least recommendations) are increasingly being made by algorithms. These algorithms may may not be fair, accurate, or understandable to the people they affect or the decisionmakers that use them. I’ll describe my experiences auditing the Arnold Public Safety Assessment (PSA), a popular risk assessment tool used in many jurisidictions for pretrial defendants, for accuracy and fairness in the city of Albuquerque. I’ll also discuss what kind of transparency we need algorithms to have in order to enforce antidiscrimination laws like the Fair Housing Act, and how claims of intellectual property and trade secrets stand in the way. Finally, I’ll argue that many laws and policies are algorithms by another name, and deserve the same scrutiny that algorithms do.

Speaker: Christopher Moore, Santa Fe Institute

Host: Professor Adilson Motter