We are living now in a radical age. How we date, whom we marry, and even what it means to be a man or woman, are all changing at a dizzying pace. In the 1950s, an unmarried mother was scorned and humiliated. Now, single woman regularly purchase their pregnancies through donor sperm and freeze their eggs for later. In the 1970s, gay men were routinely harassed and ostracized, forced either to deny their sexuality or keep it tightly locked in the proverbial closet. Now gay marriage is legal in more than 20 countries and gay weddings are featured prominently in the social pages of most...

Fair Machine Learning and Moral Philosophy

Organizations are increasingly using machine learning systems to make important decisions about how to treat particular individuals. The fair machine learning literature in computer science seeks to develop mathematical, computational, and software tools to help ensure that these systems are fair to the individuals concerned. What sort of tools will be most useful for this purpose depends in part on the nature of the concrete moral problems they are supposed to help us address. This talk will explore the nature of...

Identifying and Monitoring Disinformation across Social Platforms: Techniques for Discovery and Analysis

The dominant social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) have become critical vectors in the spread of mis- and disinformation impacting political discourse. As the platforms...

Abstract: Scoring systems are simple classification models that let users make quick predictions by adding and subtracting a few small numbers. These models are widely used in medicine and criminal justice, as experts find them easy to use and understand. In spite of extensive deployment, the vast majority of scoring systems are built using ad hoc approaches, which hinder predictive performance and fail to address critical constraints needed for adoption.

In this talk, I will describe two new machine learning methods to create scoring systems that perform...