Future Leaders Summit 2023

“Equity in Data Science”
Data Science continues to have a transformative impact on society, by enabling evidence-based decision making, reducing costs and errors, and improving objectivity. The techniques and technologies of data science also have enormous potential for harm if they reinforce inequity or leak private information. As a result, sensitive datasets in the public and private sector are restricted from research use, slowing progress in those areas that have the most to gain: human services in the public sector. Furthermore, the misuse of data science techniques and technologies will disproportionately harm underrepresented groups across race, gender, physical ability, sexual orientation, education, and more. These data equity issues are pervasive, and represent an existential risk for the use of data-driven methods in science and engineering. In this talk, I will describe a framework to think about these issues, and some initial directions where we have made progress.

“Building a culture of Responsible AI (and what it means for researchers)”
At Microsoft, responsible AI governance is crucial to guiding our AI innovation and creating AI that warrants people’s trust. We are putting our Responsible AI principles into practice by taking a people-centered approach to the research, development, and deployment of AI. In this talk, I will talk about Microsoft’s AI principles, the building blocks of operationalizing these principles across the company and our journey to creating a culture of Responsible AI.

“Human-machine partnership for conservation: AI and humans combatting extinction together”
We are losing the planet’s biodiversity at an unprecedented rate and in many cases, we do not even have the basic numbers. Photographs, taken by field scientists, tourists, citizen scientists, automated cameras, incidental photographers, and collected from social media are the most abundant source of data on wildlife today.  Data science and machine learning can turn massive collections of images into high resolution information database about wildlife, enabling scientific inquiry, conservation, and policy decisions.  Machine learning and artificial intelligence have advanced significantly over the past decade. Nonetheless, to successfully address biodiversity crisis and other societal challenges, we need the complementary capabilities of both humans and machines, in partnership.  

I will show an example of how data-driven, AI-enabled decision process becomes trustworthy by opening a wide diversity of opportunities for participation, supporting community-building, addressing the inherent data and computational biases, and providing transparent measures of performance. The community becomes the decision-maker, and AI scales the community, as well as the puzzle of data and solutions, to the planetary scale.

“From interstellar rocks to dark energy: building data science across research communities”
Over the last 10 years data science has changed the way that we approach science and research. In astronomy alone, it has impacted how we study scales as small as asteroids within our Solar System all the way to measures of the properties of the dark energy that drives the expansion of the universe. As data science becomes integral to the scientific process there are many opportunities and challenges that we face; from the development of ethical approaches to AI to how we educate a new generation of researchers to create  robust and reproducible science. In this talk Professor Connolly will discuss the evolution of data science at the University of Washington including teaching data science across the campus, incubator programs to jumpstart data science research, and the impact of Data Science for Social Good programs on the local community.  Taking the lens of astronomy’s approach to data science he will focus on examples of machine learning and AI that are being used to optimize the largest astronomical survey of the night sky; the Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time including searches for planet IX within the outer Solar System. Rubin will produce the largest multicolor movie of our night sky ever undertaken. Combining its petabytes of data with new approaches to data science will profoundly transform our understanding of the universe.