About

Dr. Varshney is a principal research staff member and manager with IBM Research AI at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, where he leads the Learning and Decision Making group. He is the founding co-director of the IBM Science for Social Good initiative. He applies data science and predictive analytics to human capital management, healthcare, olfaction, computational creativity, public affairs, international development, and algorithmic fairness, which has led to recognitions such as the 2013 Gerstner Award for Client Excellence for contributions to the WellPoint team and the Extraordinary IBM Research Technical Accomplishment for contributions to workforce innovation and enterprise transformation. He conducts academic research on the theory and methods of statistical signal processing and machine learning. His work has been recognized through best paper awards at the Fusion 2009, SOLI 2013, KDD 2014, and SDM 2015

Talk

AI Fairness 360

Level: General

Machine learning models are increasingly used to inform high-stakes decisions about people. Although machine learning, by its very nature, is always a form of statistical discrimination, the discrimination becomes objectionable when it places certain privileged groups at systematic advantage and certain unprivileged groups at systematic disadvantage. Bias in training data, due to either prejudice in labels or under-/over-sampling, yields models with unwanted bias. In this talk, I will describe AI Fairness 360 (AIF360), a comprehensive open-source toolkit of metrics to check for unwanted bias in datasets and machine learning models, and state-of-the-art algorithms to mitigate such bias. We invite you to use it and contribute to it to help engender trust in AI and make the world more equitable for all.