Hewlett Packard Data Science Institute and the Hobby School of Public Affairs presents... Data Science and You: Ethics in Data Science

Event Description:

Machine learning and data science are popping up all over. These technologies power many of our favorite gadgets, suggesting movies or consumer products we might like as well as recognizing our faces and listening to our voices. Last year, the FDA began approving the first machine learning based medical devices. Unlike previous technologies, these are not programmed by people but instead trained on many examples. Although these systems can act very much like people in some contexts, they work very differently underneath. That difference means they can exhibit unexpected behaviors, and fail in unexpected ways, which has implications for how these technologies should be understood and regulated. Machine learning and data science present novel risks, including unintentional reinscription of bias, adversarial opportunities and privacy invasion. Looking more specifically at compelling good and bad applications in the medical context, Prof. Lawrence Hunter will discuss how existing frameworks for regulating medical devices and pharmaceuticals can be extended to machine learning applications.

Speaker Bio:

Prof. Lawrence Hunter is the Director of the Computational Bioscience Program and of the Center for Computational Pharmacology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and a Professor in the departments of Pharmacology and Computer Science (Boulder). He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Yale University in 1989, and then spent more than 10 years at the National Institutes of Health, ending as the Chief of the Molecular Statistics and Bioinformatics Section at the National Cancer Institute. Prof. Hunter's research interests span a wide range of areas, from cognitive science to rational drug design. His primary focus recently has been the integration of natural language processing, knowledge representation and machine learning techniques and their application to the scientific interpretation of data generated by genome-scale molecular biology. He is the author of The Processes of Life: An Introduction to Molecular Biology, and more than 150 peer reviewed journal articles. Prof. Hunter is also an activist, lecturer and author on the ethical and social implications of the technologies he works with, having published significant works in privacy, bioethics, and openness in science.