Inspiring Minds seeks to broaden awareness and impact of graduate student research, while enhancing transferable skills. Students were challenged to describe their research, scholarship or creative activity in 150 or fewer words to share with our community.

Data preparation & ethics: How developers’ values shape the dataset in Artificial Intelligence (AI) development

Artificial intelligence systems build a model of a part of the world based on data. However, data preparation is one of the key ways that biases can infiltrate an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system. The harmful values underlying a dataset can become amplified and reinforced in the AI system, leading to outcomes such as wrongful arrests or employment discrimination against marginalized social groups. Research in the AI ethics field has focused on these problematic outcomes, but my doctoral research will examine how these datasets are prepared. By observing and talking to undergraduate students as they learn how to prepare datasets and AI teams as they put these strategies into practice, I will discover the true source of the problem of data bias.

Pinar Barlas
PhD candidate, Library and Information Science
Faculty of Information & Media Studies - Western University

Supervisor
Luke Stark

Pınar is a Library and Information Science PhD student in the Faculty for Information and Media Sciences at Western University, studying the construction of datasets for machine learning applications. Their main research goal is to minimize the harmful societal effects of Artificial Intelligence systems, by understanding how social values become embedded in the model training process. Before starting the PhD program, Pınar was a Research Associate for the Fairness and Ethics in AI-Human Interaction Multidisciplinary Research Group at the CYENS Centre of Excellence. Pınar has a BA in Cultural Studies & Communication, an MA in Interaction Design, and brief experience in the industry as a User Experience and Service Designer. 

You can connect with Pinar on the web at www.pinarbarlas.com; via email at pbarlas3@uwo.ca, and on X: twitter.com/pinbarlas/.

View Pinar's work as it appears in the Inspiring Minds Digital Collection: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/inspiringminds/480/.