AI Initiative Partners with Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy

The development and deployment of machine learning has and will continue to present a thicket of ethical dilemmas for companies, government, and society as a whole. However, to date, these struggles have often been a private one: institutions are frequently reluctant to proactively disclose the problems they have encountered, and the imperfections in the products and services they are launching.

In this respect, publicly available case studies drawing from the real world are critical on two fronts. First, they can help to advance the state of the practitioner's art, informing other specialists as they deal with same or similar challenges. Second, they help to ground the public discourse, shedding light on the real - rather than hypothetical - ethical quandaries emerging from this technology.

That’s why we’re excited to announce today that the AI Initiative is partnering with the teams at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) and their colleagues at the University Center for Human Values (UCHV) to develop and release a series of case studies in the coming year. CITP is an interdisciplinary center at Princeton University that we’ve long admired as a nexus of expertise in technology, engineering, public policy, and the social sciences. The scholars at UCHV bring deep knowledge of ethics and political theory to the workshops and case study work.

This $200,000 grant will go to expand the work that CITP has done to date by supporting researchers to develop a new set of case studies for release in 2019. It will also support a series of workshops that aim to bring together practitioners in the industry and researchers to discuss and refine this resource collaboratively.