Spring 2020

Algorithms that Affect Lives

(HONR 1310, Section 10, CRN 37840)

Lec #

Date

Topic

Readings & Notes

1

Mon Jan 6

Overview of the course

2

Wed Jan 8

Overview of algorithms, artificial intelligence, and machine learning

What Are Algorithms, and Why Do They Make People Uncomfortable? by Heinzman and Hoffman (How to Geek, April 2019).

Chapter 1 of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Russell and Norvig (Prentice Hall, 3^rd Edition, 2010)

Machine Learning: Trends, Perspectives, and Prospects by Jordan and Mitchell (Science, 2015)

Science and Data Science by Blei and Smyth (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2017)

Top 9 Ethical Issues in Artificial Intelligence by Bossmann (World Economic Forum, Oct 2016)

3

Mon Jan 13

Overview of networks and graphs

Chapter 1 of Networks, Crowds, and Markets by Easley and Kleinberg (Cambridge University Press, 2010)

Chapter 2 of Networks, Crowds, and Markets by Easley and Kleinberg (Cambridge University Press, 2010)

4

Wed Jan 15

Pros and cons of the algorithm age

Code-Dependent: Pros and Cons of the Algorithm Age by Rainie and Anderson (Pew Research Center, Feb 2017) (Read to the end of Page 18)

--

Mon Jan 20

No class

Martin Luther King Jr. Day

5

Wed Jan 22

Web search

Chapter 13 of Networks, Crowds, and Markets by Easley and Kleinberg (Cambridge University Press, 2010)

Chapter 14 of Networks, Crowds, and Markets by Easley and Kleinberg (Cambridge University Press, 2010) (skip Section 14.6)

Optional: Chapter 5 of Mining Massive Datasets by Rajaraman, Leskovec, and Ullman (Cambridge University Press, 2014)

6

Mon Jan 27

Online auctions

Chapter 15 of Networks, Crowds, and Markets by Easley and Kleinberg (Cambridge University Press, 2010) (skip Section 15.9)

Optional: Chapter 8 of Mining Massive Datasets by Rajaraman, Leskovec, and Ullman (Cambridge University Press, 2014)

7

Wed Jan 29

Societal impact of Web search and online auctions

Discrimination in Online Ad Delivery by Latanya Sweeney (Communications of the ACM, May 2013) – Additional informational website

Bias on the Web by Ricardo Baeza-Yates (Communications of the ACM, Jun 2018)

Google Autocomplete Still Makes Vile Suggestions by Issie Lapowsky (Wired, Feb 2018)

The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It by Kashmir Hill (NY Times, Jan 2020)

Optional: Auditing Autocomplete: Suggestion Networks and Recursive Algorithm Interrogation by Robertson et al (ACM Web Science 2019)

8

Mon Feb 3

Recommender systems

Chapter 1 of Recommender Systems: The Textbook by Aggarwal (Springer, 2016)

The Long Tail by Chris Anderson (Wired, Oct 2004)

Optional: Chapter 9 of Mining Massive Datasets by Rajaraman, Leskovec, and Ullman (Cambridge University Press, 2014)

9

Wed Feb 5

Recommender systems (continued)

The Million Dollar Programming Prize by Bell et al. (IEEE Spectrum, May 2009)

Rise of the Netflix Hackers by Demerjian (Wired, Mar 2007)

Up Next: A Better Recommendation System by DiResta (Wired, Apr 2018)

10

Mon Feb 10

Social bots
(Guest lecturer:
Dr. Onur Varol)

The Rise of Social Bots by Ferrara et al (Communications of the ACM, Jul 2016)

Deception Strategies and Threats for Online Discussions by Varol and Uluturk (arXiv, Jun 2019)

11

Wed Feb 12

Content ranking &
moderation in a
partisan world
(Guest lecturer:
Mr. Ronald Robertson)

Auditing Partisan Audience Bias within Google Search by Ronald Robertson et al. (Proceedings of the ACM Human-Computer Interaction, Jun 2018)

Bias Misperceived: The Role of Partisanship and Misinformation in YouTube Comment Moderation by Jiang, Robertson, and Wilson (Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, Jun 2019).

--

Mon Feb 17

No class

President’s Day

12

Wed Feb 19

Crowdsourcing

The Wisdom of Crowds: Introduction Chapter (Parts I through V) by James Surowiecki (Anchor, 2005)

Human Computation: A Survey and Taxonomy of a Growing Field by Alexander Quinn and Benjamin Bederson (Proceedings of ACM CHI Conference, May 2011)

13

Mon Feb 24

Wikipedia

Wikipedia on Wikipedia

Governance in Social Media: A Case Study of the Wikipedia Promotion Process by Jure Leskovec, Daniel Huttenlocher, and Jon Kleinberg (Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, May 2010)

Disinformation on the Web: Impact, Characteristics, and Detection of Wikipedia Hoaxes by Srijan Kumar, Robert West, Jure Leskovec (Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on World Wide Web, Apr 2016)

Wikipedia’s “Constitutional Crisis” Pits Community Against Foundation by Stephen Harrison (Slate, Jul 2019)

14

Wed Feb 26

The gig economy

Gig Work, Online Selling and Home Sharing by Pew Research Center (Nov 2016)

The Supreme Court of California, Decision on Workers Classified as Employees or as Independent Contractors (Apr 2018)

Digital Labor Platforms and the Future of Work: Towards Decent Work in the Online World (Chapters 1, 2, and 6) by Janine Bergs et al. (International Labor Organization, 2018)

--

Mon Mar 2

No class

Spring Break

--

Wed Mar 4

No class

Spring Break

15

Mon Mar 9

Facial recognition

Case Study: Facial Recognition by Hilary Cohen, Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami, and Jeremy Weinstein (Ethics, Technology, and Public Policy at Stanford University, 2018)

The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It by Kashmir Hill (New York Times, Jan 2020)

Clearview’s Facial Recognition App Has Been Used By The Justice Department, ICE, Macy’s, Walmart, And The NBA by Ryan Mac, Caroline Haskins, and Logan McDonald (BuzzFeed News, Feb 2020)

Here’s the File Clearview AI Has Been Keeping on Me, and Probably on You Too by Anna Merlan (Vice, Feb 2020)

16

Wed Mar 11

Use of algorithms in law enforcement and judicial system

Case Study: Algorithmic Decision Making and Accountability by Hilary Cohen, Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami, and Jeremy Weinstein (Ethics, Technology, and Public Policy at Stanford University, 2018)

Machine Bias by Angwin, Larson, Mattu, and Kirchner (ProPublica, May 2016)

Algorithms, Correcting Biases by Cass R. Sunstein (Social Research: An International Quarterly, 2019)

Combatting Police Discrimination in The Age of Big Data by Sharad Goel et al. (New Criminal Law Review, 2017)

17

Mon Mar 16

Use of algorithms in law enforcement and judicial system

The Accuracy, Fairness, and Limits of Predicting Recidivism by Dressel and Farid (Science Advances, Jan 2018)

The Limits of Human Predictions of Recidivism by Zhiyuan “Jerry” Lin et al (Science Advances, Feb 2020)

Impact of Risk Assessment on Judges’ Fairness in Sentencing Relatively Poor Defendants by Jennifer Skeem, Nicholas Scurich, and John Monahan (Law and Human Behavior, 2020)

18

Wed Mar 18

Misinformation online
(Guest lecturer:
Dr. Briony Swire-Thompson)

Misinformation and Its Correction: Cognitive Mechanisms and Recommendations for Mass Communication by Briony Swire and Ullrich Ecker (In. B. Southwell, E. A. Thorson, and L. Sheble. (Eds), Misinformation and Mass Audiences. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2018)

They Might Be a Liar But They’re My Liar: Source Evaluation and the Prevalence of Misinformation by Briony Swire-Thompson et al. (In Political Psychology, 2019)

19

Mon Mar 23

Online social networking

Chapter 3 of Networks, Crowds, and Markets by Easley and Kleinberg (Cambridge University Press, 2010)

Chapter 4 of Networks, Crowds, and Markets by Easley and Kleinberg (Cambridge University Press, 2010)

Chapter 5 of Networks, Crowds, and Markets by Easley and Kleinberg (Cambridge University Press, 2010)

Facebook Ads Can Still Discriminate Against Women and Older Workers, Despite a Civil Rights Settlement by Ava Kofman and Ariana Tobin (ProPublica, Dec 2019)

20

Wed Mar 25

Facebook ads
(Guest lecturer:
Prof. Alan Mislove)

Investigating Sources of PII Used in Facebook’s Targeted Advertising by Venkatadri et al. (Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, Jul 2019)

Discrimination through Optimization: How Facebook’s Ad Delivery Can Lead to Biased Outcomes by Ali et al. (Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Nov 2019)

21

Mon Mar 30

Use of algorithms in healthcare & medicine

Proposed Regulatory Framework for Modifications to Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML)-Based Software as a Medical Device (US Food and Drug Administration, Apr 2019)

Dissecting Racial Bias in an Algorithm Used to Manage the Health of Populations by Ziad Obermeyer et al. (Science, Oct 2019)

22

Wed Apr 1

Use of algorithms in hiring

The Legal and Ethical Implications of Using AI in Hiring by Ben Dattner et al. (Harvard Business Review, Apr 2019)

Can Social Media Lead to Labor Market Discrimination? Evidence from a Field Experiment by Matthieu Manant, Serge Pajak, and Nicolas Soulié (Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Aug 2018)

23

Mon Apr 6

Use of algorithms in credit scoring & loan approvals

Credit Denial in the Age of AI by Aaron Klein (Brookings, Apr 2019)

Fairness and Machine Learning: Limitations and Opportunities by Solon Barocas, Moritz Hardt, Arvind Narayanan

24

Wed Apr 8

Web privacy and tracking
(Guest lecturer:
Prof. Christo Wilson)

Online Tracking: A 1-million-site Measurement and Analysis by Englehardt and Narayanan (Extended version of a paper that appeared in Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Oct 2016) –
Associated informational website

(Un)informed Consent: Studying GDPR Consent Notices in the Field by Utz et al. (Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Nov 2019)

Panoptispy: Characterizing Audio and Video Exfiltration from Android Applications by Pan et al. (Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, Jul 2018)

25

Mon Apr 13

What should we as citizens demand in the age of AI?

Differential Privacy: A Primer for a Non-technical Audience by Kobbi Nissim et al. (Mar 2017)

Case Study: Private Platforms by Hilary Cohen, Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami, and Jeremy Weinstein (Ethics, Technology, and Public Policy at Stanford University, 2018)

A Blueprint for a Better Digital Society by Lanier and Weyl (Harvard Business Review, Sep 2018)