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Celebrating Ada Lovelace Day
Tēnā koe,
We celebrated Ada Lovelace Day on the 10th of October by diving into Gender Bias in Artificial Intelligence.
It turns out AI is a lot like cake; AI is like a recipe passed down through generations, it doesn’t matter how good your oven is, the cake will never be delicious if the ingredients aren’t quite right. Sarah Carney, CTO Enterprise at Microsoft, welcomed everyone into the event by helping us to understand the rise of AI over the last 30 years, as well as being able to recognise what gender bias in AI looks like, along with its sources. Unfortunately some of the main ingredients for our AI cake such as data sets, algorithms and the people writing the code and testing the outputs, have a tendency to introduce bias. Data sets include historical data bias (such as historical census data), algorithms that are taught what to do based on the opinions or beliefs of the developers, and of course the human bias that is inherent in us all.
Sarah was then joined by Dr. Yun Sing Koh, Associate Professor at the University of Auckland, and Kari Jones, the newly appointed CDO at Te Whatu Ora, for a panel discussion. Head to the event recording if you want to hear their contributions, including:
- Their hopes and some of the exciting new uses for AI
- How we improve our AI systems while using them (even if they’re imperfect)
- If a move towards explainability and algorithm fairness will help reduce unchecked bias
- The role of red teams, responsible AI programmes, and users to report issues and train our AI to do better
Finally, we want to thank all our industry mentors and organisations that took part in ShadowTech Day. We are so grateful for your time and the inspiration you gave over 600 students! You can check out some of the highlights here. We couldn’t have done it without you and our sponsors, Deloitte, Westpac, nuimarkets, WellingtonNZ, Tuatahi First Fibre, Verizon Connect, Ministry of Education and Tech Step.
Ngā mihi
Amanda Veldman
Executive Team
TechWomen
Read the full news here: Celebrating Ada Lovelace Day
