[Colloquium] 4/19: Nithya Sambasivan – All Equation, No Human: The Myopia of Model Centrism

[Rob Mitchum]

*UChicago CS HCI Club/Data Science Institute Seminar*


*Nithya Sambasivan*
*Sociotechnical Researcher*

*Tuesday, April 19th*
*12:30 p.m. - 1:30 p.m.*
*Remote: Watch in **John Crerar Library, Room 298 or on Zoom
<https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/99795377041?pwd=bTdDajY2RUt2NmNyVVozaGpWWk1OZz09>*


*All Equation, No Human: The Myopia of Model Centrism*
AI models seek to intervene in increasingly higher stakes domains, such as
cancer detection and microloan allocation. What is the view of the world
that guides AI development in high risk areas, and how does this view
regard the complexity of the real world? In this talk, I will present
results from a multi-year inquiry into how fundamentals of AI
systems---data, expertise, and fairness---are viewed in AI development. I
pay particular attention to developer practices in AI systems intended for
low-resource communities, especially in the Global South, where people are
enrolled as labourers or untapped DAUs. Despite the inordinate role played
by these fundamentals on model outcomes, data work is under-valued; domain
experts are reduced to data-entry operators; and fairness and
accountability assumptions do not scale past the West. Instead, model
development is glamourised, and model performance is viewed as the
indicator of success. The overt emphasis on models, at the cost of ignoring
these fundamentals, leads to brittle and reductive interventions that
ultimately displace functional and complex real-world systems in
low-resource contexts. I put forth practical implications for AI research
and practice to shift away from model centrism to enabling human
ecosystems; in effect, building safer and more robust systems for all.

*Bio*: Dr. Nithya Sambasivan is a sociotechnical researcher whose work is
in solving hard, socially-important design problems impacting marginalised
communities in the Global South. Her current research re-imagines AI
fundamentals to work for low-resource communities. Dr. Sambasivan’s work
has been widely covered in venues like VentureBeat, ZDnet, Scroll.in,
O’Reilly, New Scientist, State of AI report, HackerNews and more, while
influencing public policy like the Indian government’s strategy for
responsible AI and motivating the NeurIPS Datasets track. As a former Staff
Research Scientist at Google Research, she pioneered several original,
award-winning research initiatives such as responsible AI in the Global
South, human-data interaction, gender equity online, and next billion
users, which fundamentally shaped the company’s strategy for emerging
markets, besides landing as new products affecting millions of users
including in Google Station, Search, YouTube, Android, Maps & more. Dr.
Sambasivan founded and managed a blueprint HCI team in Google Research
Bangalore, and set up the Accra HCI team, in contexts with limited existing
HCI pipelines. Simultaneously, her research has received several best paper
awards at top-tier computing conferences.

*Host*: Marshini Chetty

*Zoom Info:*
https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/99795377041?pwd=bTdDajY2RUt2NmNyVVozaGpWWk1OZz09
Password: HCI



-- 
*Rob Mitchum*

*Associate Director of Communications for Data Science and Computing*
*University of Chicago*
*rmitchum at uchicago.edu <rmitchum at ci.uchicago.edu>*
*773-484-9890*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.cs.uchicago.edu/pipermail/colloquium/attachments/20220415/28a34f97/attachment-0001.html>