I’m a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago this year, affiliated with the Center for Applied AI at Booth School of Business. I’m excited about the opportunity to learn from a different disciplinary approach to AI and machine vision. I discovered the work of Sendhil Mullainathan, who leads the Center, when I heard one of his collaborators, Ziad Obermeyer, speak about a study they did showing how running machine learning on medical records to find predictors of a stroke gives misleading results because so much context is missing from medical data.

The Center for Applied AI focuses on algorithmic bias, and works to find solutions to it. In most of the humanities and social science approaches I’ve seen a lot of focus on what’s wrong with algorithmic bias, but less work on how to solve the problems, so I’m particularly looking forwards to learning more about that.

I’m also eager to learn about other research and activities at UChicago. Today I started auditing a digital humanities course on data analysis using R, which is brilliant since I have been teaching myself R for the last few weeks so I can do more with our data on cultural representations of machine vision. And there’s the Weston Game Lab here, too. I just hope campus opens up as planned next week so I get to actually spend more time there in person!

I’ll be continuing to lead the Machine VIsion project of course. We’ve finished the data collection phase and are just beginning to analyse the data so you’ll hear more about that soon, too.

If you know of something at UChicago or elsewhere in Chicago I should be aware of, please let me know!