December 2016 Archives

[This article is cross-posted from my blog. Thanks to Jan Leike, Zachary Lipton, and Janos Kramar for providing feedback on this post.]

This year’s Neural Information Processing Systems conference was larger than ever, with almost 6000 people attending, hosted in a huge convention center in Barcelona, Spain. The conference started off with two exciting announcements on open-sourcing collections of environments for training and testing general AI capabilities – the DeepMind Lab and the OpenAI Universe. Among other things, this is promising for testing safety properties of ML algorithms. OpenAI has already used their Universe environment to give an entertaining and instructive demonstration of reward hacking that illustrates the challenge of designing robust reward functions.

I was happy to see a lot of AI-safety-related content at NIPS this year. The ML and the Law symposium and Interpretable ML for Complex Systems workshop focused on near-term AI safety issues, while the Reliable ML in the Wild workshop also covered long-term problems. Here are some papers relevant to long-term AI safety:

Continue reading “AI Safety Highlights from NIPS 2016”

Last Friday, the University of Ca’ Foscari in Venice organized an IEEE workshop on the Human Use of Machine Learning (HUML 2016). The workshop, held at the European Centre for Living Technology, hosted roughly 30 participants and broadly addressed the social impacts and ethical problems stemming from the wide-spread use of machine learning.

HUML joins a growing number workshops for critical voices in the ML community. These include Fairness, Accountability and Transparency in Machine Learning (FAT-ML), the #Data4Good at ICML 2016, and Human Interpretability of Machine Learning (WHI), held this year at ICML and Interpretable ML for Complex Systems, held this year at NIPS. Among this company, HUML was notable especially notable for diversity of perspectives. While FAT-ML, DS4Good and WHI featured presentations primarily by members of the machine learning community, HUML brought together scholars from philosophy of science, law, predictive policing, and machine learning.

Continue reading “Machine Learning Meets Policy: Reflections on HUML 2016”