The A.I. Industry has powered a futuristic reality of self-driving cars and voice assistants to help us with almost any need. However, the A.I. Industry has also created systematic challenges. For instance, while it has led to platforms where workers label data to improve machine learning algorithms, my research has uncovered that these workers earn less than minimum wage. We are also seeing the surge of A.I. algorithms that privilege certain populations and racially exclude others. If we were able to fix these challenges we could create greater societal justice and enable A.I. that better addresses people's needs, especially groups we have traditionally excluded. In this talk, I will discuss some of these urgent global problems that my research has uncovered from the A.I. Industry. I will present how we can start to address these problems through my proposed "A.I. For Good" framework. My framework uses value sensitive design to understand people's values and rectify harm. I will present case-studies where I use this framework to design A.I. systems that improve the labor conditions of the workers operating behind the scenes in our A.I. industry. I conclude by presenting a research agenda for studying the impact of A.I. in society; and researching effective socio-technical solutions in favor of workers.
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Saiph Savage is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences where she conducts research in the intersection of Human Computer Interaction, A.I., and Civic Technology. She is one of the 35 Innovators under 35 by the MIT Technology Review, a Google Anita Borg Scholarship recipient, and a fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology. Her work has been covered in the BBC, Deutsche Welle, the Economist, and the New York Times, as well as published in top venues such as ACM CHI, CSCW, and the Web Conference, where she has also won honorable mentions and impact awards. Dr. Savage has been awarded grants from the National Science Foundation, the United Nations, diverse industry actors, and has also formalized new collaborations with Federal and local Governments where she is driving them to adopt Human Centered Design and A.I. to deliver better experiences and government services for citizens. Dr. Savage students have obtained fellowships and internships in industry (Facebook Research, Twitch Research, Twitter, Snap, and Microsoft Research) as well as academia (Oxford Internet Institute). Saiph holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and a master's and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Dr. Savage has also worked at the University of Washington, and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Additionally, Dr. Savage has been a tech worker at Microsoft Bing, Intel Labs, and a crowd research worker at Stanford.