Many decisions require some kind of personal discretion: Was a workplace accident due to negligence? Should a particular person be deport ed? In these cases\, we are inclined to preserve human agency in order to f ully consider the situation’s context (discretion)\; at the same time\, we usually don't want people making capricious choices (denoise).
In thi s talk\, computer scientist Finale Doshi-Velez and Cyberlaw Clinic lawyer M ason Kortz will discuss the challenges and opportunities for designing AIs that help us make decisions in these normative contexts\, as opposed to the predictive settings in which we have assumed that AI is helping in a predi ctive or objective setting. In many cases it's not -- and thus our support is not the right type. The session will offer interactive scenarios to disc over what helps us adhere to due process without being manipulated.
Finale D oshi-Velez is a Herchel Smith Professor in Computer Science at the Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She compl eted her MSc from the University of Cambridge as a Marshall Scholar\, her P hD from MIT\, and her postdoc at Harvard Medical School. Her interests lie at the intersection of machine learning\, healthcare\, and interpretabilit y.
Mas on Kortz is a clinical instructor at the Harvard Law School Cy berlaw Clinic at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society\, where he has worked since January 2017. There\, he draws on both his legal training and his background as a software and database developer to bring a technic al perspective to issues such as civil rights\, government transparency\, a nd police oversight. He is also active in the emerging area of the law of a rtificial intelligence and algorithms\, and has written and presented on th e impact of algorithmic decision making on areas as diverse as intellectual property\, products liability\, and the criminal legal system.
CATEGORIES:Speaker/Panel LOCATION:Berkman Klein Multipurpose Room (Room 515) GEO:0.000000;0.000000 ORGANIZER;CN="Jessica Weaver":MAILTO:jweaver@law.harvard.edu URL;VALUE=URI:https://hls.harvard.edu/events/denoising-and-discretion-ai-su pport-for-normative-decisions/ ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://hls.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/FDoshi-Velez_16x9-1.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/New_York BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 DTSTART:20250309T070000 TZNAME:EDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR