THE DATA SCIENTIST PUTTING ETHICS INTO AI Posted on : Sep 25 - 2017

Rumman Chowdhury is nothing if not a dreamer. She believes that there is no reason why the tools of artificial intelligence should be held by an elite few in Silicon Valley — putting her on a personal mission to “democratize” AI. “People will ask me, ‘Do you agree with Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg? Do you think we’re headed this way or that?’ And my answer always is, ‘We are headed in the direction that we send ourselves,’” Chowdhury says.

She points to the open source community as an example of the positive effects of putting tech in the hands of the people. Open source essentially means that the programming tools are free and “open” to anyone, and everyone builds on code that is already written. The same process should translate to AI, Chowdhury argues. “So if we start building AI today to educate people, to close barriers to entry, to make the hiring process less racist, that’s the future we will have,” she says. “It’s up to us.”

It’s also up to the 37-year-old Chowdhury. Armed with two undergraduate degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a master’s in statistics from Columbia University and a doctorate in political science from the University of California, San Diego, she works as global responsible artificial intelligence lead at Accenture (she joined the company in January after working in data science at Metis and Quotient). Big title, big vision, which she breaks into two parts: “The first is to think about what the AI-driven workforce is going to look like. We need a better system of retaining employees, training them and filling gaps in talent that we’re gonna have,” she says. “The second part is what I call responsible operations: How do we implement processes to combat algorithmic bias [bias embedded in computer programs by humans] and make sure people understand the data they’re working with. We’re still figuring it all out.” View More