ToTs & TiPs

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy Far too many algorithms in use today are being used as weapons against populations, whether they are consumers, workers, prisoners, or teachers. I'll talk about a few which I consider the worst kind - and which I call Weapons of Math Destuction - namely, those that are opaque, widespread, and powerful enough to cause tremendous destruction through feedback loops. I will also discuss suggestions for data scientists, policy makers, and the public for how to combat them. Speakers: Cathy O’Neil earned a Ph.D. in math from Harvard, was a postdoc at the MIT math department, and a professor at Barnard College where she published a number of research papers in arithmetic algebraic geometry. She then switched over to the private sector, working as a quant for the hedge fund D.E. Shaw in the middle of the credit crisis, and then for RiskMetrics, a risk software company that assesses risk for the holdings of hedge funds and banks. She left finance in 2011 and started working as a data scientist in the New York start-up scene, building models that predicted people’s purchases and clicks. She wrote Doing Data Science in 2013 and launched the Lede Program in Data Journalism at Columbia in 2014. She is a weekly guest on the Slate Money podcast and is currently writing a book about the dark side of big data called Weapons of Math Destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy coming out September 2016 with Random House.