Keynote: Challenges and Opportunities in Responsible AI

Speaker:
Saleema Amershi

Abstract:
The tech industry is facing tremendous societal and increasing legal pressure to ensure our AI technologies are responsibly developed and deployed. Yet many organizations that create AI technologies report being unprepared to address AI risks and failures.

In this talk, I will argue for why a human-centered approach is needed to meet these challenges. Specifically, I will define human-centered AI both in terms of ensuring that what we build benefits people and society and that how we build it begins and ends with people in mind. I will then describe what is needed to operationalize this definition including the cultural shift needed to move the industry from its deep-rooted focus on model performance to thinking about AI systems holistically and in context, and the tooling advances needed to empower practitioners to contend with AI's probabilistic and adaptive capabilities. Finally, I will draw connections between pressing challenges in responsible AI to familiar problems in search and information retrieval and highlight opportunities to share learnings across these fields and help drive the industry towards more human-centered practices.