Description

It's getting difficult (or impossible) to avoid interacting with computing and algorithms these days.  How computing and algorithms affect (and will continue to affect) our lives is much in the news, especially as relates to social media and artificial intelligence (AI).  Today, Jennie and Terry speak with Kenrick Mock, Dean of the UAA College of Engineering and computer scientist.  We discuss what it's like to be part of a profession that is in the process of professionalizing even as we speak.  Kenrick helps us with some definitions, and then we discuss ethical issues in computing, including pitfalls with machine learning, data privacy, and what happens when our bias makes it into our algorithms. 

Links and resources:

• We asked Kenrick to send us some good articles that would introduce non-computer scientists to issues with algorithms and ethics.  Here's what he sent us:   

• https://theconversation.com/do-social-media-algorithms-erode-our-ability-to-make-decisions-freely-the-jury-is-out-140729

• https://montrealethics.ai/social-media-algorithms-the-code-behind-your-life/

• https://erc.europa.eu/projects-figures/stories/ethics-and-ai-tackling-biases-hidden-big-data

• British Computer Society (BCS) Code of Conduct for members: https://www.bcs.org/membership-and-registrations/become-a-member/bcs-code-of-conduct/

• Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society Code of Ethics for Software Engineers: https://www.computer.org/education/code-of-ethics

• Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct: https://www.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/membership/images2/fac-stu-poster-code.pdf

• Terry mentions that the Therac-25 case was a landmark that showed the need for ethics in the computing professions – you can read up on the details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

• The film that Kenrick mentions, Coded Bias, explores a specific case in which a facial recognition tool did not recognize dark-skinned faces because it was trained exclusively on light-skinned faces, and explores other cases of bias being incorporated into algorithms: https://www.codedbias.com/

• Jennie mentions the Post No Evil episode of Radiolab, which does a great job of framing up how difficult content moderation on social media really is: https://radiolab.org/podcast/post-no-evil

• Finally, if you're not familiar with Grace Hopper, do yourself a favor and check out the life and times of Grandma COBOL herself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper