Data & Society

Tracing her experiences as a mathematician and data scientist working in academia, finance, and advertising, Cathy O’Neil will walk us through what she has learned about the pervasive, opaque, and unaccountable mathematical models that regulate our lives, micromanage our economy, and shape our behavior. Cathy will examine how statistical models often pose as neutral mathematical tools, lending a veneer of objectivity to decisions that can severely harm people at critical life moments.

Cathy will also share her concerns around how these models are trained, optimized, and operated at scale in ways that she deems to be arbitrary and statistically unsound and can lead to pernicious feedback loops that reinforce and magnify inequality in our society, rather than rooting it out. She will also suggest solutions and possibilities for building mathematical models that could lead to greater fairness and less harm and suffering.

Patrick Ball discusses how data about mass violence can seem to offer insights into patterns: is violence getting better, or worse, over time? Is violence directed more against men or women? However, in human rights data collection, we (usually) don’t know what we don’t know — and worse, what we don’t know may be systematically different from what we do know.

This talk will explore the assumption that nearly every project using data must make: that the data are representative of reality in the world. We will explore how, contrary to the standard assumption, statistical patterns in raw data tend to be quite different than patterns in the world. Statistical patterns in data reflect how the data was collected rather than changes in the real-world phenomena data purport to represent.

Using analysis of killings in Iraq, homicides committed by police in the US, killings in the conflict in Syria, and homicides in Colombia, we will contrast patterns in raw data with data in estimated total patterns of violence. The talk will show how biases in raw data can be corrected through estimation, and explain why it matters in these countries, and more generally.

Recorded on 3/24/2016.

Mark Latonero and Paula Kift on digital passageways and borders in the movement of refugees. Numerous media reports have highlighted that refugees now increasingly rely on digital devices such as smartphones in order to traverse their perilous routes, contact lost family members, or find safe places before dark. But claims that “a smartphone” may be “the most important” tool for Syrian refugees misses the bigger picture. Phones, social media, mobile apps, online maps, instant messaging, translation websites, wire money transfers, cell phone charging stations, and Wi-Fi hotspots have all created a new digital infrastructure for global movement. This infrastructure is as critical to refugees today as roads or railways. But digital infrastructures for movement can just as easily be turned into infrastructures for control by governments, corporations, and even criminals. Indeed, governments are increasingly experimenting with similar digital technologies to reinforce their border controls—to collect, process, and instrumentalize data in order to interfere with the movement of “undesirable” migrants.

Mark and Paula will explore these tensions and discuss how this new digital infrastructure 1) facilitates and constrains the flow of data and people, 2) conceals and constructs identity and status, and 3) affects refugees’ fundamental rights to privacy, data protection, and asylum.

Sean McDonald on Ebola and the Law of Disaster Experimentation. As an increasing number of industries digitize, the economy around data analysis – particularly predictive modeling – has exploded. The problem is, we don’t have any real way to understand, analyze, or predict the accuracy of these predictive models. There is no context where this has higher potential – for good and harm – than humanitarian emergencies.

One of the first, and worst, examples of this was the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa. In its response to the escalating crisis, the humanitarian community sought out significant amounts of sensitive mobile data, epidemiological data models, and digital engagement tools, without understanding the impact it would have on the response effort. Whether that’s considered humanitarian innovation or disaster experimentation, there’s little question that it raises a significant number of legal, ethical, and practical questions.

This talk will focus on the intersection of the public interest, the law, and the digital approaches that are increasingly defining the way that we invest public resources and provide public services. We’ll talk about the Ebola case, the trends in public sector digitization, and what that means for the practical and legal protections of vulnerable groups.

Health information technology can save lives, cut costs, and expand access to care. But its full promise will only be realized if policymakers broker a “grand bargain” between providers, patients, and administrative agencies. In exchange for subsidizing systems designed to protect intellectual property and secure personally identifiable information, health regulators should have full access to key data those systems collect (once properly anonymized). Moreover, patients deserve to be able to channel certain information flows and gain some basic controls over the presentation, disclosure, and redisclosure of sensitive information. This podcast will describe and examine some legal and technical infrastructure designed to help realize these goals.