
ENS Research Seminar with Professor Brent Mittelstadt from Oxford
We are proud to welcome another special guest to our ENS Research Seminar: Next Tuesday, 13 June at 4:15 PM, you will be able to listen to one of the most renowned researchers in the field of AI ethics, Professor Brent Mittelstadt from the University of Oxford. His lecture "The Unfairness of Machine Learning: Levelling down and strict egalitarianism by default" will be held in a hybrid format - everyone is welcome to join via Zoom.
In recent years, fairness in machine learning (ML) has emerged as a highly active area of research and development. In this talk, Professor Mittelstadt will examine the causes and prevalence of levelling down across fair machine learning and explore possible justifications and criticisms based on philosophical and legal theories of equality and distributive justice, as well as equality law jurisprudence. He will propose a first step towards substantive equality in fair machine learning: "levelling up" systems by design through enforcement of minimum acceptable harm thresholds, or "minimum rate constraints," as fairness constraints.
Professor Brent Mittelstadt is the Oxford Internet Institute’s Director of Research, an Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow. He founded the Governance of Emerging Technologies (GET) research programme which works across ethics, law, and emerging information technologies. He is a leading data ethicist and philosopher specializing in AI ethics, professional ethics, and technology law and policy. He currently leads the Trustworthiness Auditing for AI project which looks across ethics, law, computer science, and psychology to determine how to create and maintain trustworthy AI systems.
His research stay at the ENS is part of the
ENS fellowship program "Datafication in European Societies" funded by the Dieter Schwarz Foundation.
[Photo source: University of Oxford]