The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision on June 29, effectively ended the use of race in college admissions. Indeed, national polls found that a plurality of Americans – 42%, according to a poll conducted by the University of Massachusetts – agree that the policy should be discontinued, while 33% support its continued use … Continue reading "Fair Machine Learning Post Affirmative Action"
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Full Abstract Multi-task learning (MTL) jointly learns a set of tasks by sharing parameters among tasks. It is a promising approach for reducing storage costs while improving task accuracy for many computer vision tasks. The effective adoption of MTL faces two main challenges. The first challenge is to determine what parameters to share across tasks … Continue reading "AutoMTL: A Programming Framework for Automating Efficient Multi-Task Learning"
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Historians and archivists often find and analyze the occurrences of query words in newspaper archives, to help answer fundamental questions about society. But much work in text analytics focuses on helping people investigate other textual units, such as events, clusters, ranked documents, entity relationships, or thematic hierarchies. Informed by a study into the needs of … Continue reading "ClioQuery: Interactive Query-Oriented Text Analytics for Comprehensive Investigation of Historical News Archives"
Read MoreThere is a push right now across ACM that is gathering momentum. This push is for increased attention to cultural competency [12] in the training of computing professionals. In fact, the CS202X: ACM/IEEE-CS/AAAI Computer Science Curricula Taskforce [4] has a knowledge area subcommittee devoted to SEP or Society, Ethics, and Professionalism [5]. This subcommittee is … Continue reading "Computing Must Pay Attention to Outcomes to Achieve Equity"
Read More Powerful machine learning models can automatize decisions in critical areas of human lives, such as criminal pre-trial detention and hiring. These models are often trained on large datasets of historical decisions. However, past discriminatory human behavior may have tainted these decisions and datasets with discimination. Therefore, it is imperative to ask how can we ensure … Continue reading "How to train models that do not propagate discrimination?"
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Face recognition technology, the ability for computers to identify people from photos or videos of their faces, has become increasingly controversial in the last few years. The software is rapidly becoming more common in applications from police work and surveillance to smart phone access, entertainment applications, and even medical diagnosis. There are those who wish … Continue reading "Regulating Face Recognition Technology: An Introduction"
Read MoreFull Abstract: Recent studies found that using machine learning for social applications can lead to injustice in the form of racist, sexist, and otherwise unfair and discriminatory outcomes. To address this challenge, recent machine learning algorithms have been designed to limit the likelihood such unfair behavior occurs. However, these approaches typically assume the data used … Continue reading "Paper: Fairness Guarantees under Demographic Shift"
Read MoreFull Abstract: Variational inference for state space models (SSMs) is known to be hard in general. Recent works focus on deriving variational objectives for SSMs from unbiased sequential Monte Carlo estimators. We reveal that the marginal particle filter is obtained from sequential Monte Carlo by applying Rao-Blackwellization operations, which sacrifices the trajectory information for reduced … Continue reading "Paper: Variational Marginal Particle Filters"
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We show how to sample a small subset of points from a larger dataset, such that if we solve logistic regression, hinge loss regression (i.e., soft margin SVM), or a number of other problems used to train linear classifiers on the sampled dataset, then we obtain a near optimal solution for the full dataset. This … Continue reading "Paper: Coresets for Classification – Simplified and Strengthened"
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Most deep learning algorithms rely on error backpropagation, which is generally regarded as biologically implausible. An alternative way of training an artificial neural network is through treating each unit in the network as a reinforcement learning agent. As such, all units can be trained by REINFORCE. However, this learning method suffers from high variance and … Continue reading "Paper: MAP Propagation Algorithm: Faster Learning with a Team of Reinforcement Learning Agents"
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