INFO 5365 - Responsible AI

Summer. 3 credits. Letter grades only.

Prerequisite: basic knowledge of ML, data science, law and policy, or ethics. Enrollment limited to: Cornell Tech students. Offered in New York City at Cornell Tech.

H. Nissenbaum.

The deployment of AI systems in multiple domains raises fundamental concerns over societal values, such as, accountability, liability, fairness, transparency and privacy. The dynamic nature of AI systems requires a new set of skills informed by ethics, law, and policy to be applied throughout the life cycle of such systems: design, development and deployment. It also involves ongoing collaboration among data scientists, computer scientists, lawyers and ethicists. Tackling these challenges calls for an interdisciplinary approach: deconstructing these issues by discipline and reconstructing with an integrated mindset, principles and practices. This course aims to do so by bringing together students with diverse disciplinary backgrounds into teams that work on joint tasks in an intensive series of in-class sessions. These sessions include lectures, discussions, and group work. The course also brings together students from three campuses: Cornell Tech, Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law, and Technion with instructors and TAs from each.

Outcome 1: Increased understanding of the impact of AI on individuals, groups, society and humanity.

Outcome 2: Proactive capacity to identify ethical issues and anticipate and analyze unintended consequences and potential harms.

Outcome 3: Increased ability to communicate with professionals from other disciplines, and jointly translate across disciplinary domains.

Outcome 4: Introductory ability to oversee and audit AI systems through their life cycle (design, development and deployment).

Outcome 5: Increased capacity to identify and use resources to achieve all of the above.

Outcome 6: For those entering the field of data science, the course demonstrates how responsible professionals recognize, analyze, and behave in the face of ethical and legal challenges.

Outcome 7: For those entering management or policy positions, the course offers insight into the development and operation of AI systems.