Post by Cynthia Liem

Today, I was originally invited to join an NWO Insight Out 'Ask me Anything' panel as a female role model in STEM. I had to decline, as the session was scheduled too closely to my lecturing hours for our courses on Responsible AI and Responsible Computer Science. However, a scheduling change caused for me not to be the active lecturer today, as we hosted a guest lecturer. And then fate twisted interestingly, when Nieuwsuur called in the morning. Following algorithmic discrimination issues in the child benefit scandal and at DUO (cases that I both helped analyzing and covering in past years), there now was a damning inspectorate report on years-long erroneous, and possibly discriminatory, implementation of a recidivism algorithm. Problems occurred at many levels, from questions about the way in which human oversight was arranged, about different population samples and variable interpretation in the model, to software bugs in the actual implementation. In our Data Science & AI Technology MSc programme, we've been unique at both having Responsible AI and the Testing of AI Systems as mandatory courses. As an active teacher in both courses, I have been including algorithmic discrimination cases as course material. This news story (in some way sadly) was a very illustrative confirmation of why this is necessary. So rather than attending a role modeling event or being in classroom, there very much was role modeling for me today...related to what I am doing in the classrooms...on national TV https://lnkd.in/eKsQygP4 . (and if any of you reading this are my current students...yes you'll hear more of this story in the coming weeks for sure...)