Racism/sexism in algorithms

For my sins, or more specifically because of my interest in fairness, I was asked to be on a panel discussing algorithmic racism/bias on The Stream, a web/tv show on Al Jazeera English (as opposed to Al Jazeera America, in case you're not already confused).

I've never done live TV before, so it was quite nerve-wracking. While my "role" was to be the tech explainer, I was worried about saying something I wouldn't be able to rephrase or take back, and I was worried about the 'shouting talking heads' nature of TV discussions.

I'm glad to say that none of this transpired. We had a very genteel discussion on the merits of the issue, and there was a lot of informed commentary on the topic. Personally I thought that the discussion leaned more heavily on dealing with bias via diversity in hiring rather than on structural bias in algorithm design, but it's a very important part of the bigger picture of fairness, and it's definitely a more accessible discussion than the arcana of algorithmic disparate impact (something that I hope to change:)).

Here's the show in its entirety. And irony of ironies, I went to twitter later to change my user name back to my full name, and Twitter wouldn't let me fill in my whole last name !