The Center is pursuing four key directions:
- Investigating community experiences and perceptions of AI: To design systems that communities trust, we must first understand existing experiences and perceptions of AI. We will conduct a series of surveys and focus groups to (1) engage and better learn AI experiences and perceptions across demographics (e.g., race, class, gender), particularly with minoritized communities, and (2) consider and integrate modes of feedback, oversight, and interaction toward less or nonbiased AI systems.
- Investigating new computational methodologies for community-driven AI: To realize trustworthy AI systems, we will innovate in several fundamental AI areas, including: (1) modeling multi-stakeholder preferences; (2) developing causality-based machine learning models to improve robustness; (3) measuring, mitigating, and tracking bias in AI systems; (4) developing new modes of community-AI interactions to co-create, revise, and monitor the system based on accountability metrics and best practices.
- Equitable AI for digital health: With the above innovations, we will investigate human-centered approaches to co-design AI-based digital health applications in two domains: mental health and obesity interventions. Given the socio-economic disparities in the effectiveness of digital health apps, we will design personalized health guidance applications with a focus on algorithmic bias and fairness, providing transparent metrics to measure long-term impacts of interventions by population group.
- AI for discrimination detection: We will apply our community-driven AI framework to detect and characterize instances of discrimination by humans in five domains: hiring decisions, housing, credit markets, mental healthcare, and criminal justice proceedings. Advancing on our team’s work in audit study field experiments and natural language processing, we will develop new methodologies to detect subtle sources of linguistic discrimination in text data — for example, loan officers may provide more accurate and helpful advice to non-minority applicants.
Project Partners
Court Watch NOLA is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting transparency, equity, and justice in the criminal court system. By training volunteers to observe and report on thousands of criminal court cases a year, Court Watch NOLA works to ensure judges, prosecutors, public defenders, sheriff deputies, police officers, and other criminal justice actors are doing their jobs professionally, transparently, fairly, and economically.
We work with Court Watch NOLA to build data systems that collect, search, and report on criminal court data to improve transparency and oversight.
2022 Poster | 2021 Poster
Eye on Surveillance is a group of community members and organizations working to reduce the use of and improve the oversight of surveillance tools such as facial recognition. We are working with EoS to improve access to City Council meeting proceedings, in order to help citizens be better informed about important issues facing them.
The Data Center is a fully independent, neutral nonprofit organization that brings together data together from multiple sources to support rigorous analysis on issues that matter most to government, business, nonprofit, and community leaders in Southeast Louisiana.
The City of New Orleans Office of Information Technology and Innovation facilitates effective, cost efficient use of technology by spearheading the assessment and deployment of technology based business management solutions, and service delivery strategies.
Families Helping Families is a family-directed resource center that provides information and referral, training and education, and peer-to-peer support on issues related to disability. FHF of GNO is also home to the Louisiana Parent Training and Information Center, a federal education grant that provides training and support to families throughout Louisiana on special education and transition topics.
Our work with FHF was to develop a chatbot tool to enable easier access to information for parents of children with disabilities.
2021 Poster
