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Lecture focuses on responsible AI
UN Security Council to discuss Russian troops on Ukrainian border By KATHERINE ZEHNDER NEWS-PRESS STAFF WRITER
KENNETH SONG / NEWS-PRESS
Dr. William Wang, below, gave a lecture at UCSB, above, entitled ‘What Is Responsible AI?’
By KATHERINE ZEHNDER NEWS-PRESS STAFF WRITER
Dr. William Wang, associate professor of computer science and co-director of the natural language processing group at UCSB, gave a virtual lecture on Tuesday entitled ‘What Is Responsible AI?’ Dr. Wang’s lecture served as the kick-off event for UCSB Reads, a campus and community wide reading program run by the UCSB library. “Their new season is centered on Ted Chiang’s Exhalation, a short story collection that addresses essential questions about human and computer interaction, including the use of artificial intelligence,” according to a press release from UCSB. In this lecture, Dr. Wang addressed the concerns and challenges with artificial intelligence (AI) being subject to human bias, because these technologies are built and programmed by humans. “Sometimes these biases could lead to the ‘rich getting richer’ phenomenon after the AI systems are deployed. That’s why in addition to accuracy, it is important to conduct research in fair and responsible AI systems, including the definition of fairness, measurement, detection and mitigation of biases in AI systems,” said Dr. Wang. “It is important to first define what fairness means. Defining fairness is really difficult to do. There is a trade-off between group fairness and individual fairness,” Dr. Wang told the NewsPress when asked how research
can be conducted into fair and responsible AI. “One practical thing to think about is the trade-off. Accuracy and efficiency are also important and should be taken into consideration. If you have welldefined concepts, how would you be able to optimize?The challenge with the system is that data is always changing, if you only rely on historical data, you will see an accuracy drop, known as the Distribution Shift,” Dr. Wang continued. Dr. Wang addressed two primary issues that need to be changed in order to decrease the likelihood of bias in AI: data set collections and models. On the topic of Data set collections, one example Dr. Wang gave was that of female snowboarders. Wikipedia editors only show about 20% of snowboarders to be female, whereas when peer-reviewed research is surveyed there is a greater percentage due to differing amounts of data. Models were the second point that Dr. Wang addressed which needed to be improved to decrease the likelihood of bias “How do we build better models? Models that will not exemplify bias in the data set. How would you be able to build a system that considers different user groups, long term queries etc.,” said Dr. Wang. “In reality, because we are using human-generated data, it is very easy to encode human bias. But it is our responsibility to build systems that serve more people, However it is also important to focus on key strategic areas. Bias
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SpaceX delays launch due to cruise liner in hazard area By KATHERINE ZEHNDER NEWS-PRESS STAFF WRITER
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that leads to offline violence and harms, those are the worst cases and we should avoid those. Energy efficiency is another area in which we must be responsible,” Dr. Wang told the News-Press, when asked if AI would always be subject to bias to a certain extent. “Really think about your data. How can your data set better represent diversity of groups? You can develop better algorithms and better machine learning systems. But you don’t want your systems to predict this sensitive variable. However you want to understand the objectives. Think about the data, the algorithms
and the model,” Dr. Wang told the News-Press when asked how we can continually decrease the percentage of bias in AI. “At UCSB we take mission learning research very seriously. Interdisciplinary research is very unique to UCSB and it is our strength. I hope we have more people interested in working together and learning about AI so that we have a good ecosystem. It is a new area and it is an emerging area. We want humancentered technology,” said Dr. Wang. email: kzehnder@newspress.com
The launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket bearing an Italian SkyMed earth observation satellite was delayed for a fourth time Sunday, despite weather conditions at Cape Canaveral being favorable for a launch. According to a tweet from SpaceX, the launch was delayed by a ship in the operation’s hazard area. The company said their team is currently hoping to complete the launch today at 3:11 p.m. With just under one minute left on the countdown, the launch director called a hold, due to a ship in the hazard area as a cruise liner made its way toward the no-go zone, which the coast guard was unable to clear out in time for the launch Sunday. “The vehicle is still healthy; the payload is healthy. Everything was looking good for
an on-time liftoff today, aside from the range,” said Jessie Anderson, SpaceX production manager, during a webcast of the launch attempt, according to a report by Space.com. “The Cosmo-SkyMed Second Generation program is a collaboration among the Italian Space Agency, the Italian Ministry of Defense and the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Scientific Research. The network consists of two satellites, which study our planet using synthetic aperture radar (SAR),” reported Mike Wall, Senior Space Writer for Space.com. A livestream of the rescheduled launch is set to begin at 2:56 p.m. today. Weather conditions look good for today’s launch. The launch will be livestreamed at www.spacex. com. The Falcon 9 will launch from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. email: kzehnder@newspress.com
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Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, promised that the UN Security Council would put significant pressure on Moscow during the Monday discussion of Russian troops massing at the Ukrainian border. “Russia cannot block the security council from holding a meeting. They will certainly attempt to. They will distract from our unified voices. But they know that they cannot block the meeting … The security council is unified. Our voices are unified in calling the Russians to explain themselves. We’re going to go in the room prepared to listen to them, but we’re not going to be distracted by their propaganda and we are going to be prepared to respond to any disinformation that they attempt to spread during this meeting,” Ms. Thomas-Greenfield told George Stephanopoulos, anchor of ABC’s This Week and former White House communications director during the Clinton administration. “At this time, they’re saying that Russia threatens Ukraine — that’s completely ridiculous. We don’t want war and we don’t need it at all,”said Nikolai Patrushev, head of Russia’s Security Council, on Sunday, reported NPR. “They have continued to escalate despite our effort to try to find a diplomatic route for them and to encourage them to de-escalate. Part of the reason we are calling this meeting on Monday, is one more opportunity to find a diplomatic way out for the Russians … We know that an attack is possible. You don’t amass 100,000 troops if you don’t intend to use them,” Ms. Greenfield told Mr.
Stephanopoulos. Russian Foreign Minister Segey Lavrov commented Sunday concerning Ukraine and NATO, saying that the NATO powers “have already come close to Ukraine. They also want to drag this country there … although everyone understands that Ukraine is not ready and could make no contribution to strengthening NATO security … It is difficult to call it defensive. Do not forget that they bombed Yugoslavia for almost three months, invaded Libya, violating the U.N. Security Council resolution, and how they behaved in Afghanistan.” “More than 100,000 Russian troops are deployed on the Ukrainian border and Russia is engaging in other destabilizing acts aimed at Ukraine, posing a clear threat to international peace and security and the UN Charter. As we continue our relentless pursuit of diplomacy to de-escalate tensions in the face of this serious threat to European and global peace and security, the UN Security Council is a crucial venue for diplomacy,” Ms. Greenfield said in a statement on Thursday. Russian President Vladimir Putin has made no public response so far concerning the western response. While Mr. Lavrov made it clear that the West’s response leaves little room for reaching an agreement. He also emphasized the contention that NATO expansion is a threat. The U.S. and NATO have formally rejected Russia’s demands to halt NATO expansion. However, Washington outlined areas where discussion could take place and offered hope that there might be a path which does not lead to war.
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