TILT seminar: Professor Sandra Wachter

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have become an integral part of our daily lives. Algorithms are making important decisions ranging from job and loan applications, university admissions, medical diagnosis and treatment plans to sentencing criminals. This technology bears the potential for time and cost efficient and more consistent decisions. At the same time these systems are known to be black boxes that are often privacy-invasive, biased and inexplicable. This means we are facing a major accountability gap. Humans and algorithms are very different in the way they make decisions. Unfortunately, the legal tools available (e.g. data protection and non-discrimination law) were designed to govern humans, not artificial systems, and thus fail to protect us against those novel risks. I will examine regulatory frameworks that are ill-equipped to keep biased algorithms in check and I will shed light what can be done from a regulatory perspective to prevent biased, discriminatory, unintended, or socially undesirable outcomes.

Speaker:  Sandra Wachter

Professor Sandra Wachter is an Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow in Law and Ethics of AI, Big Data, and robotics as well as Internet Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford.

Research Interests: Data Ethics; Big Data; AI; machine learning; algorithms; robotics; privacy; data protection-, IP- and technology law; fairness, algorithmic bias, explainability, European, -International-, human rights,- non-discrimination law; governmental (algorithmic) surveillance; emotion detection; predictive policing; Internet regulation; cyber-security; (bio)-medical law.

Moderator: Merel Noorman