I’ll be chairing a panel on “Automated Decision-Making” at the AALS’s Jan 2015 conference. It’s co-sponsored by the Section on Internet and Computer Law and the Section on Defamation and Privacy.
Please come by and say hello, or send an email and maybe we can meet up some other time. One of the good things about the AALS is a chance to see old friends and it’s been a while since I went to one.
The panel, Saturday at 10:30am, should be well worth your time:
Proliferating sensors, affordable data storage, indiscriminate personal data collection, and increasingly robust predictive algorithms individually raise issues related to privacy, security, and due process. Combined, however, these technological advances have created a nearly insatiable appetite for data in order to improve organizational decision-making. The domains across which this voracity reaches include consumer lending, insurance, advertising, legal compliance, national security, and employment.
Automated decision-making promises accuracy and efficiency, but it is also rife with peril. Humans irrationally trust decisions made by computers, even though bias is easily hard-wired into computer systems. The use of personal data to make extremely nuanced and particularized decisions raises a number of privacy concerns. Incorrect inputs risk correspondingly erroneous outputs. Automated decision-making could also have a disparate impact on vulnerable populations that are susceptible to certain kinds of influence or that find it hard to fight back. Compounding this problem is the almost complete lack of meaningful transparency for those subjected to automated decisions.
Policy makers are struggling to respond to the challenges posed by automated decision-making. This panel will explore those challenges and will attempt to identify similarities and differences among the varied domains in which automated decision-making operates.
Moderator:
A. Michael Froomkin, University of Miami School of Law
Panelists:
- Meg Leta Ambrose, Georgetown University School of Communication, Culture & Technology
- Frank Pasquale, University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law
- Dennis D. Hirsch, Capital University Law School
- Michael Rich, Elon University School of Law
DATE: Saturday, 1/3/2015
TIME: 10:30 am-12:15 pm
ROOM: Thurgood Marshall West, Mezzanine Level, Marriott Wardman Park Hotel
