Diversity in Computing: Dr. Jiahao Chen on Anti-Racism in AI

The Barnard CSC is excited about our third Diversity in Computing Speaker, Dr. Jiahao Chen, Chief Technology Officer of Parity AI.

Missed this talk? Watch it here on our Youtube Channel!

Practicing what you Publish: From Academia to an Anti-Racist AI Startup

Dr. Chen discusses how his thinking on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is informed by his work on fairness and ethics in algorithmic decision making, which has evolved throughout his nontraditional career path. He's gone from academia and research software engineering, to industrial positions in large companies and startups. He'll share some challenges he has encountered in taking ideas from research to concrete practical code and policy, like ethical harms assessments, privacy risks like deidentification, and difficulties faced in measuring outcomes and errors. These factors come together to complicate practices that measure inclusivity and mitigate bias. This motivates Parity AI's work, which is to build anti-racist, responsible AI solutions for enterprises, particularly in highly regulated industries like finance, healthcare, and hiring.

Jiahao Chen is the incoming Chief Technology Officer at Parity AI (getparity.ai), a startup focused on AI ethics and bridging the translation gap between risk, legal, and data teams. He is an outgoing AI Research Director at JPMorgan AI Research in New York, with research focusing on holistic design of responsible AI systems, incorporating fairness, explainability, privacy, governance, etc. as first-class considerations. He was previously a Senior Manager of Data Science at Capital One focusing on machine learning research for credit analytics and retail operations. When still in academia, Jiahao was a Research Scientist at MIT CSAIL where he co-founded and led the Julia Lab, focusing on applications of the Julia programming language to data science, scientific computing, and machine learning. Jiahao has organized JuliaCon, the Julia conference, for the years 2014-2016, as well as organized workshops at NeurIPS, SIAM CSE, and the American Chemical Society National Meetings. Jiahao has authored over 120 packages for numerical computation, data science and machine learning for the Julia programming language, in addition to numerous contributions to the base language itself, and has published over 50 peer-reviewed papers.

As part of the Year of Science @ Barnard College, the Vagelos Computational Science Center (CSC) is excited to announce our first Diversity in Computing Speaker Series. This series will run for the 2021–2022 academic year and will feature talks from scholars and practitioners in computational fields who explore what DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) looks like in STEM.

There is an urgent need to more fully consider the ethical and social implications of computing and its applications: for example, in designing addictive social media platforms or in using AI for facial or name recognition, which can lead to housing discrimination, racial biases in job hiring, or restrictions on personal freedoms through public and private surveillance.

To better understand how to counter these biases, this series rethinks STEM disciplines from the inside out. We invite one leader in a STEM field every month to speak about the work they are doing to diversify and broaden inclusion in their fields by either sharing their research, their experiences and initiatives in industry or academia, or their thoughts on how power structures within computing disciplines should be transformed to create more equitable systems.

For more information about the Barnard CSC, go to https://www.csc.barnard.edu or follow us on Instagram and Twitter (@barnard_csc), and Facebook.

This talk will take place online. A Zoom link will be sent to registrants shortly before the event.