Dozens of online students and several alumni from the Information School’s Master of Science in Information Management program gathered at the University of Washington campus for the third annual MSIM Online Student Summit to discuss responsible innovation and artificial intelligence.
The Feb. 20-21 summit began with a Friday evening reception at Kane Hall, where iSchool Dean Anind Dey led off with remarks stressing the importance of designing responsible information systems that are secure and values-driven.
“The speed at which the tools have increased have made it so that anybody can innovate no matter what background they're coming from,” Dey told the crowd. “That's great. It's also incredibly dangerous without that responsible view of things.”
Dey encouraged those in attendance to get to know one another and to meet iSchool faculty during the summit, and then “to graduate as quickly as possible so we can help us create that future that I'm hoping for that is all about responsibility.
“We need a new generation of innovators that are thinking about how to build responsible systems, because if you look at the tech world, I don't see a lot of responsibility there,” Dey said.
A keynote presentation and Q&A followed with Emily Witko (pictured at top), director of people and diversity, equity and belonging at Hugging Face, an open-source platform for machine learning applications. Witko shared several examples of companies and organizations bringing undercooked artificial intelligence to consumers. Some, such as a McDonald’s drive-thru robot, had humorous results, while others, such as a flawed New York City chatbot, have caused harm by giving users inaccurate or discriminatory information.
“Your dean so thoughtfully mentioned earlier that our guardrails are sort of becoming a little bit less guardraily in certain situations,” Witko said. “We don't know exactly what sort of regulations our government will require, what our future companies will require. And so a lot of this is going to be on you folks.
“It's going to be your job to make sure that before these things go to the public that they've been fully tested and created responsibly,” she added.
A Saturday full of workshops at Mary Gates Hall followed, featuring topics such as AI policy, value-sensitive design, “robots, romance and religion,” and a day in the life of a Google program manager.
The sessions included a fishbowl conversation where participants discussed the book “The Technology Fallacy” by Gerald C. Kane and three co-authors. In a fishbowl conversation, people sit in a circle and take turns getting their chance to go to the middle and speak. Attendees were eager to jump in throughout, making for a lively conversation about the book, which focuses on how organizations respond to new technologies.