The famous saying, “numbers don’t lie,” might work when reporting the score of a football game, but even then, the numbers don’t tell the whole story.
Algorithms developed by data scientists have implications for not only who may obtain a fair loan, but with who stays in prison and who’s released, and who will be favored by machine learning “decisions.” With so many parts of our lives decided by Big Data, how do scientists balance the algorithms and the ethics?
The Notre Dame College of Science and Notre Dame Alumni Association's ThinkND, along with partners from across the University, are launching The Science Lab, an open, multimedia educational enrichment program featuring Notre Dame’s world-class science researchers and other scientific leaders. The first in the series, Numbers Can Lie: When algorithms work perfectly but fail miserably, will be held at noon Eastern time on three Fridays: Oct. 9, Oct. 23, and Nov. 6.
The program is led by Roger Woodard, the Director of Notre Dame’s Online Master’s in Data Science program. In the three sessions of this program, listeners will learn the basics behind data science and discover how easily human bias can be encoded into computer models.
Registration opens Friday, Sept. 25.
Originally published at science.nd.edu.