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EVENT DETAILS |
On February 26, 2018 Cathy O'Neil will join us to speak about her book, Weapons of Math Destruction.
Weapons of Math Destruction
We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives-where we go to school, whether we get a car loan, how much we pay for health insurance-are being made not by humans, but by mathematical models. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules, & bias is eliminated.
But as Cathy O'Neil reveals, the opposite is true. The models being used today are opaque, unregulated, & uncontestable, even when they're wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination: If a poor student can't get a loan because a lending model deems him too risky (by virtue of his zip code), he's then cut off from the kind of education that could pull him out of poverty, & a vicious spiral ensues. Models are propping up the lucky & punishing the downtrodden, creating a toxic cocktail for democracy. Welcome to the dark side of Big Data.
O'Neil exposes the black box models that shape our future, both as individuals & as a society. These weapons of math destruction score teachers & students, sort rsums, grant (or deny) loans, evaluate workers, target voters, set parole, & monitor our health.
O'Neil calls on modelers to take more responsibility for their algorithms & on policy makers to regulate their use. But in the end, it's up to us to become more savvy about the models that govern our lives. Her talk willempower us to ask the tough questions, uncover the truth, & demand change.
About Cathy O'Neil
Cathy O'Neil is the author of theNew York TimesbestsellingWeapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality & Threatens Democracy, which was also a semifinalist for the National Book Award.
She earned a Ph.D. in math from Harvard, was a postdoctoral fellow in the MIT math department, & a professor at Barnard College where she published a number of research papers in arithmetic algebraic geometry. She then switched over to the private sector, working as a quantitative analyst for the hedge fund D.E. Shaw in the middle of the credit crisis, & then for RiskMetrics, a risk software company that assesses risk for the holdings of hedge funds & banks. She left finance in 2011 & started working as a data scientist in the New York start-up scene, building models that predicted people's purchases & clicks.
Cathy wroteDoing Data Sciencein 2013 & launched the Lede Program in Data Journalism at Columbia in 2014. She is a columnist forBloomberg View.
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