POSTPONED: Open Book / Open Mind; Meredith Broussard ONLINE

More Than A Glitch

Broussard of NYU journalism school discusses her new book, "More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender and Ability Bias in Tech," with Janet Haven of Data & Society, a technology think tank.

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Open Book / Open Mind is sponsored by Montclair Public Library Foundation, Watchung Booksellers, Rosemary Iverson and an anonymous donor. We are also grateful for the generous support of our in-kind sponsors, First Congregational Church of Montclair, The George, and Amanti Vino. To support Open Book / Open Mind and other library programs, click here to donate. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Meredith Broussard is Associate Professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University and Research Director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology. She is the author of Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (MIT Press). Her work has been featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Atlantic, BBC, Wired, the Economist, and more. She appears in the 2020 documentary Coded Bias and serves on the advisory board for the Center for Critical Race & Digital Studies. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

"The word “glitch” implies an incidental error, as easy to patch up as it is to identify. But what if racism, sexism, and ableism aren't just bugs in mostly functional machinery—what if they're coded into the system itself?

Broussard, a data scientist and one of the few Black female researchers in artificial intelligence, masterfully synthesizes concepts from computer science and sociology. She explores a range of examples: from facial recognition technology trained only to recognize lighter skin tones, to mortgage-approval algorithms that encourage discriminatory lending, to the dangerous feedback loops that arise when medical diagnostic algorithms are trained on insufficiently diverse data. Even when such technologies are designed with good intentions, Broussard shows, fallible humans develop programs that can result in devastating consequences.

Broussard argues that the solution isn't to make omnipresent tech more inclusive, but to root out the algorithms that target certain demographics as “other” to begin with. With sweeping implications for fields ranging from jurisprudence to medicine, the ground-breaking insights of "More Than a Glitch" are essential reading for anyone invested in building a more equitable future."—MIT Press

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

Janet Haven is the Executive Director of Data & Society. She has worked at the intersection of technology policy, governance, and accountability for twenty years, both domestically and internationally. Before joining D&S, where she previously served as Director of Programs and Strategy, Haven spent more than a decade at the Open Society Foundations overseeing funding strategies and grant-making related to technology’s role in strengthening civil society. Haven is a member of the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee, which advises President Biden and the National AI Initiative Office. She sits on the board of the Public Lab for Open Technology and Science. Haven lives in Montclair.

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