Month: May 2017

NYU Law’s Algorithms and Explanations

Last week, on April 27th and 28th, I attended Algorithms and Explanations, an interdisciplinary conference hosted by NYU Law School’s Information Law Institute. The thrust of the conference could be summarized as follows:

  1. Humans make decisions that affect the lives of other humans
  2. In a number of regulatory contexts, humans must explain decisions, e.g.
    • Bail, parole, and sentencing decisions
    • Approving a line of credit
  3. Increasingly, algorithms “make” decisions traditionally made by man, e.g.
    • Risk models already used to make decisions regarding incarceration
    • Algorithmically-determined default risks already used to make loans
  4. This poses serious questions for regulators in various domains:
    • Can these algorithms offer explanations?
    • What sorts of explanations can they offer?
    • Do these explanations satisfy the requirements of the law?
    • Can humans actually explain their decisions in the first place?

The conference was organized into 9 panels. Each featured between 3 and 5 20-minute talks followed by a moderated discussion and Q&A. The first panel, moderated by Helen Nissenbaum (NYU & Cornell Tech), featured legal scholars (including conference organizer Katherine Strandburg) and addressed the legal arguments for explanations in the first place. A second panel featured sociologists Duncan Watts (MSR) and Jenna Burrell (Berkeley) as well as Solon Borocas (MSR), an organizer of the Fairness, Accountability and Transparency in Machine Learning workshop.

Katherine Jo Strandburg, NYU Law professor and conference organizer

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Machine Learning Security at ICLR 2017

(This article originally appeared here. Thanks to Janos Kramar for his feedback on this post.)

The overall theme of the ICLR conference setting this year could be summarized as “finger food and ships”. More importantly, there were a lot of interesting papers, especially on machine learning security, which will be the focus on this post. (Here is a great overview of the topic.)

food-and-ships

On the attack side, adversarial perturbations now work in physical form (if you print out the image and then take a picture) and they can also interfere with image segmentation. This has some disturbing implications for fooling vision systems in self-driving cars, such as impeding them from recognizing pedestrians. Adversarial examples are also effective at sabotaging neural network policies in reinforcement learning at test time.

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