Technical Introduction to Ethical AI - May 2021

This one-day course is for people who use or interact closely with models and the technical teams building them. The course provides a conceptual understanding of what is necessary to build systems that use machine learning to make automated decisions whilst accounting for ethical objectives. It includes presentations, discussions, a group project, and hands-on interactive exercise modules which will consolidate the concepts from the course.

Outcomes

Participants will gain a conceptual understanding of the theoretical, technical, and organisational challenges in creating ethical AI systems, as well as approaches to addressing those challenges.

Prerequisites

This course is for people with a technical background who have had exposure to machine learning or statistical modelling, and are comfortable interpreting data from a graph and discussing concepts such as averages across different groups and population averages.

Outline of topics

• Automated decision making: We explore the core concepts underlying how machine learning systems operate with an emphasis on conceptual understanding and implications for ethics, including how to specify intent within a machine learning system and the importance of recognising uncertainty in predictions.
• Quantifying intent: We explore in-depth how objectives and intent are encoded within data-driven decision-making systems and the impact these choices have on outcomes.
• Algorithmic bias and fair machine learning: We explore how bias can arise in automated decision-making systems and some approaches to detect and mitigate it.
• Interpretability, transparency & accountability: We explore some of the tools and techniques for making AI systems more transparent and interpretable and discuss the extent to which these tools may satisfy the underlying rationale of transparency.
  

Visit our website for the full course description and more information about our organisation.

SOME FEEDBACK FROM OUR RECENT ATTENDEES

'The team at Gradient did an excellent job... I really enjoyed the session, took an increased level of
appreciation for the role our AI specialists fulfill and warmly will encourage others to consider these sessions – well done Team and thank you! ... well executed, huge wealth of knowledge from the speakers and well fact based through their experience – this wasn’t just text book theory led, which I greatly appreciated the practical applications.'

'It was amazing. I haven't even heard of anything else like it. It is like applied philosophy of science. And the instructors were knowledgeable and patient and really insightful...Amazing job! You guys are incredible.'

Instructors

Two Gradient Institute members, from our team of researchers and course developers, are present throughout the course to lead and answer any questions. Find out more about our team on our people page.

Course format

This is an online course with instructors joining live available for the duration of the course.

Remote meetings can be challenging, so we’ve done our best to replicate a live classroom with video-conferencing, live chat, and break-out rooms. At the beginning of each topic, there will be a short presentation and discussion introducing key concepts. To explore the concepts in greater depth, participants work through interactive exercises in Jupyter notebooks, supported by one-on-one guidance from the tutors. The notebook solutions and the presentation material will be provided after the course as a reference. 

To participate in the course, you will need:

• a computer with a webcam, microphone and audio 
• a reliable internet connection 
• a current version of Firefox, Chrome/Chromium, Safari or Edge 
• the ability to access Microsoft Teams and gradientinstitute.org from your network
  

More information about systems requirements will be sent out closer to the course.

Send an email to training@gradientinstitute.org if you have any questions or to discuss a corporate course for your organisation.

Tickets

Register by 11:59 PM Monday 26/04/2021 to save 10% of the ticket price. 

Save 25% when you register yourself and one or more colleagues. 

Registrations close 11:59 PM Monday 3/05/2021. Listed prices are inclusive of discounting and GST.