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Start date:
Jan 2018
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End date:
Jun 2021
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Contact:
Research Fellow & British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow
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Funder:
- British Academy
This project defines requirements for ethical auditing of automated decision-making systems.
Overview
Vast streams of data are now mined across research, commerce, government, and healthcare domains. From credit applications to user profiling, a range of work historically led by humans can increasingly be automated. Seemingly free of the biases and blind spots of human analysts, decisions about which information, interventions and opportunities to offer to people can now be made automatically, by algorithms. However, automated decisions often replicate old biases and generate new ones, and create opportunities for harmful and discriminatory decisions without meaningful channels of recourse. To complicate matters, automated decision-making, particularly involving machine learning, often works as a ‘black box’.
This project specifies requirements for ethical auditing of automated decision-making systems. This will be accomplished by defining (1) a taxonomy of potential harms, (2) normative interpretability requirements, and (3) normative and technical constraints on the design of ethical auditing for automated decision-making.
People
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Brent Mittelstadt
Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
Research Fellow & British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow
News
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New research to explore governance of emerging technologies
16 December 2019
The Oxford Internet Institute, part of the University of Oxford, is undertaking a new research programme exploring the Governance of Emerging Technologies (GET).
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Public at risk of discrimination from online behavioural advertising, says Oxford legal expert
25 November 2019
A leading expert in ethics and law from Oxford Internet Institute (OII), University of Oxford and the Alan Turing Institute, believes current regulation might fail to protect the public from the inherent bias in online behavioural-based advertising.
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Principles are no guarantee of ethical AI, says Oxford ethicist
4 November 2019
A leading expert in data ethics at the Oxford Internet Institute, believes the establishment of principles for the governance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will not guarantee its trustworthy or ethical use by companies and organisations.
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Oxford Internet Institute academics win prestigious award for AI paper
7 June 2019
OII academics Dr Sandra Wachter and Dr Brent Mittelstadt have won the University of California, Berkeley Law, Privacy Law Scholars Conference (PSLG) Junior Scholar’s award.
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Associate Professor title awarded to Dr Sandra Wachter
14 May 2019
The Social Sciences Division at the University of Oxford has conferred the title of Associate Professor on Dr Sandra Wachter in recognition of distinction in her field and her contributions to the research, teaching and administration of the OII.
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OII researchers call for changes to data protection law to protect consumer and individual privacy
18 September 2018
OII researchers call for changes to data protection law to protect consumer and individual privacy
Blog
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Algorithmic bias within online behavioural advertising means public could be missing out, says Associate Professor Sandra Wachter
Date Published: 26 November 2019 - 11:29 am
Authors: Sara Spinks
Behavioural advertising describes the placement of particular adverts in the places we visit online, based on assumptions of what we want to see. In ...
Read More Algorithmic bias within online behavioural advertising means public could be missing out, says Associate Professor Sandra Wachter -
Could Counterfactuals Explain Algorithmic Decisions Without Opening the Black Box?
Date Published: 15 January 2018 - 10:37 am
Authors: Brent Mittelstadt
Algorithmic systems (such as those deciding mortgage applications, or sentencing decisions) can be very difficult to understand, for experts as well as the general ...
Read More Could Counterfactuals Explain Algorithmic Decisions Without Opening the Black Box? -
Should there be a better accounting of the algorithms that choose our news for us?
Date Published: 7 December 2016 - 2:44 pm
Authors: Brent Mittelstadt
The Facebook Wall, by René C. Nielsen (Flickr). A central ideal of democracy is that political discourse should allow a fair and critical exchange ...
Read More Should there be a better accounting of the algorithms that choose our news for us?
Press
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Strip searches and ads: 10 tech and privacy hot spots for 2020
Date Published: 30 December 2019
Source: Reuters
From whether governments should use facial recognition for surveillance to what data internet giants should be allowed to collect, 2019 was marked by a heated global debate around privacy and technology.
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Algorithms drive online discrimination, academic warns
Date Published: 12 December 2019
Source: Financial Times
Sandra Wachter says AI uses sensitive personal traits to target or exclude people in ads