Faculty

Aylin Caliskan specializes in ethical artificial intelligence

DISRUPTING BIAS IN AI

Photo by Doug Parry

By Mary Lynn Lyke

Can machines be sexist? Researcher Aylin Caliskan found out the answer when she entered “O bir profesör, O bir öğretmen” into Google Translate on her computer. “O” is a gender-neutral pronoun in Turkish; it can mean “she,” “he” or “it.” The Google program, powered by statistical machine translation algorithms, translated the Turkish sentences as “He is a professor. She is a teacher.”

The gender-biased response was not an anomaly, she found. As they process massive language datasets, rapidly learning as they go, artificial intelligence (AI) programs tend to associate female terms — she, her, sister, daughter, mother, grandmother — with arts and family. They link male terms with science, mathematics, power and career.

“This is the way AI perceives the world,” says Caliskan, who joined the iSchool faculty this fall as an assistant professor specializing in the emerging field of AI ethics.

Sexism, racism, ageism, ableism and LGBTQ discrimination are rapidly spreading through such everyday, big-tech tools as text generation, voice assistance, translation and information retrieval, warns Caliskan. “Machines are replicating, perpetuating and amplifying these biases, yet no regulation is in place to audit them.”

Caliskan joined the UW’s new Responsible AI Systems & Experiences team, a research group investigating how intelligent information systems interact with human society. “These researchers are world leaders in the field,” she says. “It is extremely humbling to be part of it.”

She has been following research at the iSchool for more than a decade, starting with Professor Batya Friedman’s foundational paper tracking bias in computer systems in the late ’90s. “The iSchool is home to the first

Let storytellers be the guide

By Jim Davis

For Lindah Kotut, it sounded like a fine excuse for tea. Traveling to a conference in Namibia in southern Africa in 2019, Kotut wondered what people who aren’t online think about the online world. So, she decided to ask them.

Kotut, who was pursuing a Ph.D. in computer science at Virginia Tech, arranged to interview village elders in Namibia and her home country of Kenya who had never used a computer.

Turns out, they do have strong opinions about their privacy and security online, about how they’re represented and how their stories are told in the digital world.

This became a life-changing moment for Kotut, who made her dissertation about this tension between the online and offline worlds. The new assistant professor at the Information School thinks that this should be a priority for people pushing the frontiers of computer science.

“When you build the next system, it should become almost a default question to ask, ‘Who have you talked to about this?’” Kotut said. “How is it affecting people outside of your circle? How is it affecting someone who doesn’t have power?”

Her academic advisor at Virginia Tech, Scott McCrickard, noted how she looked at Kenyan museums and how they capture and share stories compared with villages and their oral traditions.

“She explored the comfort levels of the elders there with regard to what is it that they’re OK with sharing and what is it that will go to the grave with them,” said McCrickard, an associate professor of computer science.

Kotut’s interest in computer science began when she was growing up in Kenya. Her father had a subscription to Reader’s Digest and the stories that interested her the most were about computers. After high school, Kotut decided to study abroad for the opportunity to learn computer science. She landed a partial scholarship at a community college in Albany, Georgia.

She later obtained a bachelor’s degree from Georgia Southern University, a master’s degree from Norfolk State University and her Ph.D. this past May.

After interviewing people in Namibia and Kenya, Kotut was supposed

to go back for more research, but the COVID-19 pandemic forced her to scrap those plans. Still, the work made her interested in pursuing research about the digital world and oral story traditions, especially in Indigenous communities.

That’s why she was so attracted to the iSchool, which has a research focus on Indigenous Knowledge and an experienced cadre of faculty with a mission to study the use of digital technologies to protect and preserve the stories of Native communities.

“You have to establish trust, but the best way to establish trust is to work with people who already work with these communities,” Kotut said.

Kotut wants to meet with the Indigenous populations in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere around the world while exploring how technology affects those without a voice in it.

“That vision is what I’m bringing into the start of my career,” Kotut said. “It’s been an adventure so far. I’m just looking forward to seeing what happens.”

Lindah Kotut explores how digital spaces affect communities with oral traditions — and how stories can shape technology

Photo by Doug Parry

‘Interrogator of archives’

Temi Odumosu brings expertise in the impact of colonialism on special collections

By Mary Lynn Lyke in the hand, the figure throws it in the mouth and the eyes roll backward.

Temi Odumosu spotted the cast-iron The bank was “haunting” the store, bank in an antique furniture store in says the art historian and curator. “I was Copenhagen. Made in China, the bank deeply disturbed by it.” Disturbed, then had an onyx-black face, kinky hair and enraged, then the scholar in her kicked an exaggerated grin, wide, with cherry- in and she started asking questions. How red lips and impossibly white teeth. It had the cast-iron object migrated from was a modern replica of the popular the Jim Crow toy culture in America to “Jolly (N-word) Bank,” a kids’ plaything Denmark? What were children learning at the turn of the century. Place a coin from the crude representation? Who made it? And, disconcertingly, why was there still market demand for such racial memorabilia denigrating Africans and African Americans?

Odumosu brought the bank and the load of difficult questions into her various classrooms, including at Malmö University in Sweden, where she is a senior lecturer in cultural studies. Students were profoundly affected. “People say, ‘Oh, the bank is so innocent. But things change when you get up close, start to unravel its past and see the biased design logic in such a clear way,” she says. “Once you see that faulty logic, you can actually intervene and shift perspectives.”

Odumosu will be joining the iSchool in January, bringing to the UW her expertise in colonial archiving and archives, representations of Africandescendant peoples, and the digital afterlives of slavery in the cultural commons online. She’s excited to work collaboratively with new iSchool peers. “Even though my iSchool interviews were all virtual, I could feel the cohesion among the faculty,” she says. “I had a sense people really like one another and are genuinely interested in each other’s work.”

A self-described “interrogator of archives,” Odumosu will be deep diving into special collections at the university, local museums, and other cultural heritage institutions, investigating material that helps to tell more nuanced and dignifying stories of the African diaspora. “Archives are not easy spaces, but they can provide openings to make contact with people and lifeways that have been forgotten or ignored.”

Odumosu holds both a master’s and doctoral degree from the University of Cambridge. Her Ph.D. thesis became the award-winning book “Africans in English Caricature, 1769-1819: Black Jokes, White Humor.” It contains detailed analysis of satirical prints circulated among elites at the time that featured a motley cast of characters (from servants to royalty) who were part of a growing British empire under the shadow of the transatlantic slave trade. The comic imagery was brutal, and Odumosu ruled out using some of the most painfully

racist images.

This refusal to reproduce is part of what she calls “an ethics of care” — a resistance to trading in pain and humiliation. It is critical in a digital era when a disturbing image can be instantly uploaded and the material used in ways that institutions never expected, she says.

As a curator, Odumosu is bold and creative, comfortable with experimentation and eager to communicate research outside of the academy. She and her collaborators have used augmented reality, media projections, film programs, sound installations, mobile apps and performance art to spotlight unfinished colonial histories for the public.

“She is able to bridge the theoretical with the practical in a way that few scholars manage,” says colleague Susan Kozel, professor of philosophy, dance and media technologies at Malmö University. “Further, she can engage in politically charged atmospheres in a way that feels generous and, when necessary, uncompromising — because at times she knows all of us can and should do more, or do what we do differently.”

Odumosu was born in London to parents who migrated from Nigeria in the 1970s. When she was a child, her mother made her and her siblings a set of dolls representing all the different tribes on the African continent. “My parents did a good job of creating positive imagery for us growing up in a socially polarized England at the time,” she says.

Then she moved to Denmark. “It was a bit like traveling back in time to a country where racist terms are still used in everyday language — a country that puts personal freedom above political correctness.”

She is currently working on a research project exploring the colonial entanglements of Nordic countries that have seen themselves as innocent in these histories and shrouded their participation in the slave trade in silence.

Says Odumosu: “It is these gaps, misrecognitions and silences that we are working to transform.” The iSchool recently welcomed several core teaching faculty members and a postdoctoral scholar .

Julia Deeb-Swihart joined the school as an assistant teaching professor . Deeb-Swihart brings deep experience in machine learning, information visualization and human-centered design to the iSchool . Her teaching focuses on the intersection of HCI, data science and ethics, with additional expertise in computer vision and computational criminal justice . Deeb-Swihart is a Ph .D . candidate in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech’s College of Computing (anticipated Autumn 2021), where she previously earned her bachelor’s in computer science .

Madeline Jalbert, a social and cognitive psychology researcher, started at the Center for an Informed Public as a postdoctoral scholar . She studies how context and subjective experiences influence memory, judgment and decision-making . The goal of her work is to shed light on effective strategies for preventing and correcting the spread of misinformation . Jalbert completed her Ph .D . in Social Psychology at the University of Southern California .

Wes Eli King stayed on at the iSchool as a lecturer after completing their Ph .D . earlier this year . King locates their research at the intersection of technology, religion and gender . King taught a Special Topics in Informatics course on internet dating in spring 2020, and has developed a course on AI, robots and transcending religion that brings together their scholarship with their interest in science fiction and imagining futures . Sean Pettersen, who had been a guest faculty member, is now an assistant teaching professor . He brings more than 22 years of enterpriselevel experience to the classroom and has previously worked at the developer, engineer, architect, program manager and executive levels . Pettersen has worked with companies including T-Mobile, Amazon, Microsoft, the National Football League, Nike, Blizzard Entertainment and EA . He holds an MSIM from the UW iSchool .

Melanie Walsh arrived as an assistant teaching professor after teaching at Cornell University, where she designed a programming curriculum for humanities and social science students . She is interested in data science education as well as digital humanities, cultural analytics, literature, social media, and social justice movements . Before her postdoc at Cornell, Walsh received her Ph .D . in English Literature from Washington University in St . Louis, where she worked as a fellow in the Humanities Digital Workshop .

Heather Whiteman, a new arrival as an assistant teaching professor, has a master’s degree and Ph .D . focusing on the science of understanding people at work . Whiteman is an experienced educator and prior executive focused on the areas of data analytics, digital transformation, and strategic talent management . She currently serves as a Future Workplace Executive Fellow and as a board and tech advisor to organizations focused on “people data for good .” She has been selected as a Fulbright Scholar to Guatemala for 2021-2022 .