Introduction Post
Hi, my name is Aaryan Mahipal and I’m a grade 12 student from Welham Boys’ school, India. I’m an aspiring architect, an avid writer and budding artist. Some of my hobbies include — reading, writing, painting, cooking and organization management. I joined the Inspirit AI Program to broaden my scope of study having no prior experience with programming except HTML5. I’m curious about a lot of things and the covid-19 pandemic gave me time to tap into these curiosities and learn from them. Over the summer, I studied a wide range of courses that seemed to fit my versatile yet dichotomous personality — including fine arts at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Digital Fabrication at Harvard University and Number Theory at the University of Utah.
My experience so far with Inspirit AI has been absolutely amazing. I’m truly spell-bound by the boundaries we can surpass through Artificial Intelligence. Due to this program, I’ve started to consider Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning as a possible minor in college. Also, this program built a foundation for me with a lot of machine learning approaches that is helping me to complete my research on autonomous vehicles and predicted death rates. My instructor is Mr. Natan Vidra, who just graduated from Cornell University with a Masters in CS and Bachelor’s in ECE. It was really fun working with him as he maintains a very playful atmosphere in class with his witty and humorous jokes and gimmicks. A memorable lecture was the one where we discussed the term ‘fairness’ in context with ethics in AI. We touched the basics of Bayes theorem, something I had already learnt in AP Statistics. Our project deals with Computer vision in criminal justice. We studied a software that predicts the risk factor of Criminals, allowing us to alter their imprisonment period accordingly. However, the largest ethical issue with this software is that it is prejudiced against the black. Just for example, a black man with less violent and fewer felonies than a white man is posed to have a higher risk factor.
This article should give you a better understanding about this software and its ethical problems (https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing).
We are working towards re-developing this software while trying to eliminate racial injustice altogether.
Through this 3-part blog series, I would be tapping into Ethics as a wide branch. I would be discussing my criminal justice, or rather, ‘criminal injustice’ project too, however I would also elaborate on racial and gender bias in other AI systems. In my opinion, we as a society have allowed our stereotypes to be testaments to certain decisions which on a basic ethical level is incorrect. By approaching that first, the vision of AI systems can be transformed and true ‘fairness’ can be introduced.
Anyone interested in AI and Ethical Issues with AI in particular, you can follow this blog series which I will also be posting on my personal website. I write about a lot of other things as well. You can follow me here — www.aaryanmahipal.com.
.Aaryan Mahipal is a Student Ambassador in the Inspirit AI Student Ambassadors Program. Inspirit AI is a pre-collegiate enrichment program that exposes curious high school students globally to AI through live online classes. Learn more at https://www.inspiritai.com/.
