Today, more companies are deliberately extending their social responsibility initiatives at the behest of investors, customers, and employees. How should industry be viewing and factoring societal equity into its [business and] research agendas? This roundtable explored the concept, principles, and best practices of socially responsible computing research.
The computing research community has been making strides to address diversity and inclusion, but the topic of equity is also critical though less well understood. Equity is often equated with equal opportunity. Recently it has become clear that the framing of research questions, priorities, and directions has implications for equity. Examples include:
- Bias in machine learning: image recognition training sets have been inadequately representative of a broader population, harming certain populations in law enforcement settings.
- Overreach in mortgage eligibility algorithms, leading to outcomes that can perpetuate structural inequity.
- The cryptography community’s focus has evidently omitted the concerns of a broader public, for example, Anti-Apartheid activists in South Africa had to develop their own creative approaches to private communications.
Within industry, the general focus on use-inspired research implies that funding flows to areas that are relevant to for-profit entities, often in ways that can increase equity (telecommunications is one example). However, there are also areas that can be under-explored, for example, sustainability topics related to externalities of production or health issues in poor populations.
We can infer that even curiosity-driven research begs the question “whose curiosity is being satisfied”? By implication one tool (but not the only tool, and possibly not a sufficient tool) for societal equity is diversity in the research community itself. However diversity and inclusion alone may not be sufficient; this roundtable seeks to highlight complementary considerations that research leaders can incorporate into their thinking.
Discussants
Manuela Veloso, Head of AI Research, JP Morgan
Manual is head of J.P. Morgan AI Research and Herbert A. Simon University Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where she was previously head of the machine learning department. She serves as the president for the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) until 2014, and the co-found and a past president of the RoboCup Federation. She is a fellow of the AAAI, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She is an international expert in artificial intelligence and robotics.
Charles Isbell, Dean & Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology
Charles Isbell is an American computationalist, researcher, and educator. He has been a professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing since 2002, and since July 2019 is the John P. Imlay, Jr. Dean of the College. His research interests focus on machine learning and artificiall intelligence, particularly interactive and human-centered AI. He has published over 100 scientific papers. In addition to his research, Charles has been an advocate for increasing acces to and diversity in higher education.
Maria Bezaitis, Fellow and Chief Architect, Socio-Technical Systems, Intel
Maria Bezaitis is a humanities-trained research leader. Her work is focused on AI, networks and changing relationships between people and technology. Bezaitis has created structures about the social and cultural landscape of society to aid in developing innovations in technology. Bezaitis joined Intel in June 2006, where she was the Director of the People and Practices Research Group. For her later work at Intel, Bezaitis develops business models to aid in creating new device interfaces and security technologies. She works on the social and cultural aspects of society, which help in developing business models for tech industries. Prior to Intel, Bezaitis was the Managing Partner at E-Lab, where she utilized ethnographic methods in design planning for consumer products, packaged goods and branding. She received her Ph.D at Duke University in French Literature.
Wade Shen, Chief Program Officer, Actuate Innovations
Wade Shen is the CPO for Actuate, which is a new kind of non-profit organization formed to contribute a fresh approach to society’s critical challenges by designing and running R&D programs that create breakthroughs. Shen had previously been a DARPA program manager, researcher at MIT Lincoln Laboratories, and Founder and CTO of of Vocentric. His research interests include machine learning, machine translation, speech recognition, and data analytics for improved human/computer interaction. Shen has served as the chair of Lincoln Laboratory’s Advanced Concept Committee, on DARPA’s Information Science and Technology (ISAT) study group and as the US technical representative for NATO’s IST-078 and IST-102 speech/language processing study groups. Shen received his master’s degree in computer science from the University of Maryland, College Park and his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Jaime Teevan, Chief Scientist for Experiences and Devices, Microsoft
Jaime Teevan is Chief Scientist for Microsoft‘s Experiences and Devices, where she is charged with creating the future of productivity. Previously she was the Technical Advisor to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research AI, where she led the Productivity team. Dr. Teevan uses AI to help people accomplish their goals, developing the first personalized search algorithm used by Bing and introducing microproductivity into Office. Her research earned her the Technology Review TR35 Young Innovator, Borg Early Career, Karen Spärck Jones, and SIGIR Test of Time awards. She holds a Ph.D. from MIT and a B.S. from Yale, and is an affiliate professor at the University of Washington.
Glenn Ricart, CEO, Founder and CTO, US Ignite
Glenn Ricart brings experience in innovation from academia, federal agencies, and large and small corporate experiences. Glenn is an Internet pioneer who implemented the first Inter-net interconnection point (the FIX in College Park, Maryland) and was recognized for this achievement by being inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in August 2013. In one of his previous roles where he was academic CIO at the University of Maryland, his campus implemented the first institution-wide TCP/IP (Internet) network in 1983 using low-cost PDP-11 routers (“Fuzballs”) with software devised at the University of Maryland. Glenn was the principal investigator of SURAnet, the first regional TCP/IP (Internet) network of academic and commercial institutions. Dr. Ricart has also held other senior management positions including Executive Vice President and CTO for Novell in the 1990s, Managing Director of PricewaterhouseCoopers, and CEO and President of National LambdaRail. Dr. Ricart is also the founder or co-founder of five startups. Glenn’s formal education includes degrees from Case Institute of Technology and Case Western Reserve University, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science is from the University of Maryland, College Park.
Chris Ramming, Senior Director of Research & Innovation, VMware
Chris Ramming research manager with a passion for bridging theory and practice. He joined VMware to help drive organic innovation and is responsible for the VMware Academic Program (VMAP) as well as an incubator that explores disruptive technologies to create new revenue streams for the company. He serves on the CRA Board and is a member of the CRA-Industry steering group; he serves on the DARPA ISAT steering committee and is a former chair; he is also immediate past chair of the UIDP. He has worked with several leading research organizations including Intel Labs, DARPA, AT&T Research, and Bell Labs. At DARPA, he led a number of programs related to mobile ad-hoc networking and distributed decision support systems. At AT&T/Bell Labs Research he focused on telecommunications-related software, services, and languages.
Divesh Srivastava
Divesh Srivastava is the Head of Database Research at AT&T Labs-Research. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Vice President of the VLDB Endowment, on the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association (CRA), on the ACM Publications Board and an associate editor of the ACM Transactions on Data Science (TDS). He has served as the managing editor of the Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), as associate editor of the ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), and as associate Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE). He has presented keynote talks at several international conferences, and his research interests and publications span a variety of topics in data management. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA, and his Bachelor of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India.
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