Fred Kan Distinguished Lecture in Engineering Ethics

Our infrastructural systems, including basic utilities like electricity, water and sewage, telecommunications, and transportation – shape and enable our lives as we know them. Over the past century, they’ve grown to span the globe and so to define, in the words of Ursula Franklin, the ‘real world of technology’ in which we all live. Today, faced with the reality of anthropogenic climate change but with new possibilities of renewable energy generation at scale, we have the opportunity to transform these systems so that they are reliable and sustainable, resilient and equitable. The infrastructural networks that we benefit from today are the physical embodiment of the values of those who came before us, and now it’s our turn: we can collectively build out these systems for our shared future, informed by a new kind of engineering ethics.

Deb Chachra, PhD, is the author of How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World (2023) and a Professor of Engineering at Olin College of Engineering near Boston, Massachusetts, where she was one of the earliest faculty members. She works primarily at the intersection of technology and culture, and she speaks, writes, consults, and facilitates globally around design, education (particularly engineering education), and equity and inclusion issues. Prior to joining Olin College, Dr. Chachra held an NSERC postdoctoral fellowship at MIT, and she completed her graduate and undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto. While an engineering student, she co-founded Science Outreach, the first science and engineering summer camp at the university.

When algorithms fall short of expectations, people get hurt.

To hold AI systems builders accountable, we can use an algorithm audit — a tool that has been part of the conversation for years in the context of online platforms. They are now beginning to emerge as a mode of external evaluation in the deployment of automated decision systems (ADS) and are being included in critical policy proposals as a primary mechanism for algorithmic accountability. However, not all audits are made equal.

In this talk, Deborah Raji will discuss the ongoing challenges in executing algorithm audits, and will highlight the technical, policy, and institutional design interventions that are necessary for audits to be effective mechanisms for accountability.

Deborah Raji (EngSci 1T9) is a PhD student in computer science at University of California, Berkeley, and a Mozilla fellow. She is interested in algorithmic auditing and evaluation and has worked with Google’s Ethical AI team, and been a research fellow at the Partnership on AI and AI Now Institute at New York University, working on projects to operationalize ethical considerations in ML engineering practice. She has also worked closely with the Algorithmic Justice League initiative to highlight bias in deployed AI products.

Raji is one of the 2023 TIME “100 Most Influential People in AI”. She was also a Forbes 2021 “30 Under 30”, and one of the MIT Tech Review’s 2020 “35 Under 35 Innovators”.

Two areas of automated mobility are raising ethical questions that require our careful attention. First, today’s vehicles are increasingly equipped with advanced driver assist systems (ADAS), such as lane keeping assist and adaptive cruise control. ADAS partially automate safety critical driving tasks but require a particular kind of driver monitoring for their safe operation, thus placing the human operator in the novel dual-role of driver/system monitor. Second, automated navigation systems, which are increasingly used to monitor and dictate the flow of vehicles, are creating new power relations and redefining access to mobility. In this talk, Dr. Millar introduces these two technologies and explores the various ethical considerations that are the topics of current research in his lab, the Canadian Robotics and AI Ethical Design Lab (CRAiEDL). While exploring these topics he also describes the benefits of shifting our approach to teaching and practicing engineering to adopt a more interdisciplinary perspective that includes core input from the arts and humanities—two academic areas that traditionally exist outside of technical practice.

Engineers adhere to a professional code of ethics. This is important for maintaining professionalism and ensuring public safety within the various disciplines of engineering. However, codes are always subject to interpretation both as they are enacted by individuals, companies, or organizations and as they are enforced by oversight bodies. Such interpretation has at its heart the worldview of the interpreters. As a result, we face challenges on two fronts: First engineering encompasses a diverse population in gender, politics, ethnicity, and religion—some of the main constituent pieces of an individual worldview. Second, engineering work has already developed products both digital and physical unimagined and unaccounted for by professional codes. These challenges lead not only to conflicts in interpretation of a standardized code but to the inadequacy of the code to handle critical ethical decisions. To address these challenges, engineering educators would benefit from deeper understanding of worldview, how it is formed, and how we can promote meaningful ethical consensus across individual diversity.