Meredith Broussard

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Meredith Broussard
Meredith Broussard.jpg
Broussard in 2018
Born
United States
Education Columbia University, Harvard University
Occupation(s)Associate Professor, Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute NYU
Known forResearch in artificial intelligence and investigative reporting; coining the term "technochauvinism"
Website meredithbroussard.com

Meredith Broussard is a data journalism professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. [1] Her research focuses on the role of artificial intelligence in journalism.

Contents

Career

Broussard was previously a features editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer , and a software developer at the AT&T Bell Labs and MIT Media Lab. Broussard has published features and essays in many outlets including The Atlantic , Harper’s Magazine , and Slate Magazine . She is the author of the nonfiction books Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World [2] and More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech. [3]

As a fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she built Bailiwick, a tool designed to uncover data-driven campaign finance stories, created for the United States presidential election of 2016. [4]

Currently, Broussard is an associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University, a research director of the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology, and an advisory board member of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies. [5] [6] [7]

Broussard appeared as herself in the 2020 Netflix documentary, Coded Bias, which follows researchers and advocates as they explore how algorithms encode and propagate bias. [8] [9] She has been interviewed on a number of topics, including algorithmic bias, for several media outlets, including The Verge, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times , and Harvard Magazine . [2] [10] [8] [11]

Publications

Broussard has published a wide range of books examining the intersection of technology and social practice. Her book Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World , published in April 2018 by MIT Press, examines the limits of technology in solving social problems. [12] Her book More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech was published in March 2023. [13] She has been profiled in Communications of the ACM [14] and cited by Christopher Mims of The Wall Street Journal as an expert in the future of self-driving car technology. [15] Other publications and works of hers include:

Selected academic publications

Related Research Articles

Artificial intelligence (AI), in its broadest sense, is intelligence exhibited by machines, particularly computer systems. It is a field of research in computer science that develops and studies methods and software that enable machines to perceive their environment and use learning and intelligence to take actions that maximize their chances of achieving defined goals. Such machines may be called AIs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eliezer Yudkowsky</span> American AI researcher and writer (born 1979)

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky is an American artificial intelligence researcher and writer on decision theory and ethics, best known for popularizing ideas related to friendly artificial intelligence. He is the founder of and a research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), a private research nonprofit based in Berkeley, California. His work on the prospect of a runaway intelligence explosion influenced philosopher Nick Bostrom's 2014 book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.

Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalize to unseen data and thus perform tasks without explicit instructions. Recently, artificial neural networks have been able to surpass many previous approaches in performance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Computational sociology</span> Branch of the discipline of sociology

Computational sociology is a branch of sociology that uses computationally intensive methods to analyze and model social phenomena. Using computer simulations, artificial intelligence, complex statistical methods, and analytic approaches like social network analysis, computational sociology develops and tests theories of complex social processes through bottom-up modeling of social interactions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hackathon</span> Event in which groups of software developers work at an accelerated pace

A hackathon is an event where people engage in rapid and collaborative engineering over a relatively short period of time such as 24 or 48 hours. They are often run using agile software development practices, such as sprint-like design wherein computer programmers and others involved in software development, including graphic designers, interface designers, product managers, project managers, domain experts, and others collaborate intensively on engineering projects, such as software engineering.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kate Crawford</span> Australian writer, composer, and academic

Kate Crawford is a researcher, writer, composer, producer and academic, who studies the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. She is based in New York and works as a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, the co-founder and former director of research at the AI Now Institute at NYU, a visiting professor at the MIT Center for Civic Media, a senior fellow at the Information Law Institute at NYU, and an associate professor in the Journalism and Media Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. She is also a member of the WEF's Global Agenda Council on Data-Driven Development.

The ethics of artificial intelligence covers a broad range of topics within the field that are considered to have particular ethical stakes. This includes algorithmic biases, fairness, automated decision-making, accountability, privacy, and regulation. It also covers various emerging or potential future challenges such as machine ethics, lethal autonomous weapon systems, arms race dynamics, AI safety and alignment, technological unemployment, AI-enabled misinformation, how to treat certain AI systems if they have a moral status, artificial superintelligence and existential risks.

Computational journalism can be defined as the application of computation to the activities of journalism such as information gathering, organization, sensemaking, communication and dissemination of news information, while upholding values of journalism such as accuracy and verifiability. The field draws on technical aspects of computer science including artificial intelligence, content analysis, visualization, personalization and recommender systems as well as aspects of social computing and information science.

Automated journalism, also known as algorithmic journalism or robot journalism, is a term that attempts to describe modern technological processes that have infiltrated the journalistic profession, such as news articles and videos generated by computer programs. There are four main fields of application for automated journalism, namely automated content production, Data Mining, news dissemination and content optimization. Through artificial intelligence (AI) software, stories are produced automatically by computers rather than human reporters. These programs interpret, organize, and present data in human-readable ways. Typically, the process involves an algorithm that scans large amounts of provided data, selects from an assortment of pre-programmed article structures, orders key points, and inserts details such as names, places, amounts, rankings, statistics, and other figures. The output can also be customized to fit a certain voice, tone, or style.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Algorithmic bias</span> Technological phenomenon with social implications

Algorithmic bias describes systematic and repeatable errors in a computer system that create "unfair" outcomes, such as "privileging" one category over another in ways different from the intended function of the algorithm.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joy Buolamwini</span> Computer scientist and digital activist

Joy Adowaa Buolamwini is a Canadian-American computer scientist and digital activist formerly based at the MIT Media Lab. She founded the Algorithmic Justice League (AJL), an organization that works to challenge bias in decision-making software, using art, advocacy, and research to highlight the social implications and harms of artificial intelligence (AI).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Safiya Noble</span> American professor and author

Safiya Umoja Noble is the David O. Sears Presidential Endowed Chair of Social Sciences and Professor of Gender Studies, African American Studies, and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is the Director of the UCLA Center on Race & Digital Justice and Co-Director of the Minderoo Initiative on Tech & Power at the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2). She currently serves as Interim Director of the UCLA DataX Initiative, leading work in critical data studies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Meredith Whittaker</span> American artificial intelligence research scientist

Meredith Whittaker is the president of the Signal Foundation and serves on its board of directors. She was formerly the Minderoo Research Professor at New York University (NYU), and the co-founder and faculty director of the AI Now Institute. She also served as a senior advisor on AI to Chair Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission. Whittaker was employed at Google for 13 years, where she founded Google's Open Research group and co-founded the M-Lab. In 2018, she was a core organizer of the Google Walkouts and resigned from the company in July 2019.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Timnit Gebru</span> Computer scientist

Timnit Gebru is an Eritrean Ethiopian-born computer scientist who works in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI), algorithmic bias and data mining. She is a co-founder of Black in AI, an advocacy group that has pushed for more Black roles in AI development and research. She is the founder of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR).

<i>Coded Bias</i> 2020 American documentary film

Coded Bias is an American documentary film directed by Shalini Kantayya that premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. The film includes contributions from researchers Joy Buolamwini, Deborah Raji, Meredith Broussard, Cathy O’Neil, Zeynep Tufekci, Safiya Noble, Timnit Gebru, Virginia Eubanks, and Silkie Carlo, and others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Algorithmic Justice League</span> Digital advocacy non-profit organization

The Algorithmic Justice League (AJL) is a digital advocacy non-profit organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 2016 by computer scientist Joy Buolamwini, the AJL uses research, artwork, and policy advocacy to increase societal awareness regarding the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in society and the harms and biases that AI can pose to society. The AJL has engaged in a variety of open online seminars, media appearances, and tech advocacy initiatives to communicate information about bias in AI systems and promote industry and government action to mitigate against the creation and deployment of biased AI systems. In 2021, Fast Company named AJL as one of the 10 most innovative AI companies in the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rashida Richardson</span> American attorney and scholar

Rashida Richardson is a visiting scholar at Rutgers Law School and the Rutgers Institute for Information Policy and the Law and an attorney advisor to the Federal Trade Commission. She is also an assistant professor of law and political science at the Northeastern University School of Law and the Northeastern University Department of Political Science in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities.

<i>Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World</i> 2018 non-fiction book

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World is a 2018 American book, a guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology and why we should never assume that computers always get it right. It won the 2019 Prose Award in the Computing and Information Sciences category, and has been widely reviewed.

Automated decision-making (ADM) involves the use of data, machines and algorithms to make decisions in a range of contexts, including public administration, business, health, education, law, employment, transport, media and entertainment, with varying degrees of human oversight or intervention. ADM involves large-scale data from a range of sources, such as databases, text, social media, sensors, images or speech, that is processed using various technologies including computer software, algorithms, machine learning, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, augmented intelligence and robotics. The increasing use of automated decision-making systems (ADMS) across a range of contexts presents many benefits and challenges to human society requiring consideration of the technical, legal, ethical, societal, educational, economic and health consequences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rumi Chunara</span> American computer scientist

Rumi Chunara is a computer scientist who is an associate professor of biostatistics at the New York University School of Global Public Health. She develops computational and statistical approaches to acquire, integrate and make use of data improve population-level public health.

References

  1. "Meredith Broussard". Journalism.nyu.edu.
  2. 1 2 Chen, Angela (2018-05-23). "How computers misunderstand the world". The Verge. Retrieved 2021-09-25.
  3. Broussard, Meredith (2024-03-15). "More Than a Glitch". Mitpress.mit.edu. MIT Press. ISBN   9780262047654.
  4. "Washington Post Monkey Cage Blog". Washington Post .
  5. "Faculty". NYU Journalism. Retrieved 2021-09-25.
  6. "Associates – NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology" . Retrieved 2021-09-25.
  7. "About". Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies. 2016-12-07. Retrieved 2021-09-25.
  8. 1 2 Gibson, Lydialyle (2021-08-02). "Bias in Artificial Intelligence". Harvard Magazine. Retrieved 2021-09-25.
  9. Kantayya, Shalini (2020-11-11), Coded Bias (Documentary), 7th Empire Media, Chicken And Egg Pictures, Ford Foundation - Just Films, retrieved 2021-09-25
  10. "Talking with Meredith Broussard about 'Artificial Unintelligence'". Los Angeles Times. 2018-04-26. Retrieved 2021-09-25.
  11. Quito, Anne. "The Anthony Bourdain audio deepfake is forcing a debate about AI in journalism". Quartz. Retrieved 2021-09-25.
  12. Broussard, Meredith (2018-04-01). Artificial Unintelligence. MIT Press. ISBN   9780262038003.{{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
  13. Greenawalt, Marc (2022-12-02). "Spring 2023 Announcements: Science". Publishers Weekly. Retrieved 2022-12-14.
  14. "Putting the Data Science into Journalism". Cacm.acm.org.
  15. Mims, Christopher (2018-09-13). "Driverless Hype Collides With Merciless Reality". Wall Street Journal. ISSN   0099-9660 . Retrieved 2020-12-22.
  16. Broussard, Meredith (May 12, 2017). "Broken Technology Hurts Democracy". The Atlantic .
  17. International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. 43(2) 150–157. 2017. doi : 10.1177/0340035216686355 .
  18. Broussard, Meredith (February 23, 2016). "How to Think About Bots". Motherboard.
  19. Broussard, Meredith (December 2, 2015). "New Airbnb Data Reveals Some Hosts Are Raking In Big Bucks". Huffington Post .
  20. Broussard, Meredith (November 20, 2015). "The Irony of Writing Online About Digital Preservation". The Atlantic .
  21. Broussard, Meredith (July 8, 2015). "The Secret Lives of Hackathon Junkies". The Atlantic .
  22. Broussard, Meredith (April 19, 2015). "When Cops Check Facebook". The Atlantic .
  23. Digital Journalism . (Taylor & Francis)  2015. doi : 10.1080/21670811.2015.1074863 .
  24. Newspaper Research Journal . 36(3) 299 –313. 2015. doi : 10.1177/0739532915600742 .
  25. Broussard, Meredith (July 15, 2015). "Why Poor Schools Can't Win at Standardized Testing". The Atlantic .
  26. Digital Journalism . (Taylor & Francis)  2014. doi : 10.1080/21670811.2014.985497 .