Homework: Reflect on Readings

Background

As part of this course, you will be given assigned readings. These readings will focus on topics such as design, AI, and ethics. It is important that you take the time to reflect on each week’s readings in order to fully comprehend the material and be fully prepared for the following week’s course.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this activity, you will have a better grasp of the readings assigned for this week. You will have summarized the main concepts and ideas presented in the papers using your own words. This will enable you to work with the materials more effectively as the course progresses.

Instructions

  • In your notebook, create an entry for each question below, with an answer to the question in your own words.
  • Questions for Burrell (2016)
    1. The author outlines three distinct types of opacity: (1) corporate secrecy, (2) technical literacy, and (3) complexity of scale. Can you briefly describe each type and the primary solution proposed in the paper for each type?
    2. Two brief case studies show how “the machine thinks.” According to the author, what is the fundamental difference between how machines and people reason?
    3. In the final section, the author discusses the problem of interpretability and concludes that efforts to solve it by explaining how inputs are related to outputs are doomed to failure. What are some of the reasons the author gives for this?
  • Questions for Mitchell et al. (2019)
    1. The authors propose model cards to solve a specific problem related to pre-trained models and their impacts. Can you summarise the problem and how model cards address it?
    2. The authors argue for a specific type of evaluation called “disaggregated evaluation.” Can you explain in your own words what that means?
    3. The authors distinguish between classification and score-based systems and describe an approach to evaluation metrics for each type: a confusion matrix and pinned area-under-the-curve (pinned AUC). In your own words, can you explain each type of metric?

Product

The assigned readings should be summarized in your own words and captured in your personal notebook as a collection of notes, each containing the summary of one idea.

Follow-up

Generated ideas will be used in next week’s session.