Trustworthy Machine Learning
Trustworthy ML is a way of thinking and something to be worked on and operationalized throughout the entire machine learning development lifecycle, starting from the problem specification phase that should include diverse stakeholders.
In this episode
Kush Varshney
Distinguished Research Staff Member and Manager, IBM Research
Kush R. Varshney was born in Syracuse, New York in 1982. He received a B.S. degree (magna cum laude) in electrical and computer engineering with honors from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, in 2004. He received the S.M. degree in 2006 and the Ph.D. degree in 2010, both in electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge. While at MIT, he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Dr. Varshney is a distinguished research staff member and manager with IBM Research at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, where he leads the machine learning group in the Foundations of Trustworthy AI department. He was a visiting scientist at IBM Research - Africa, Nairobi, Kenya in 2019. 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 trustworthy machine learning. His work has been recognized through best paper awards at the Fusion 2009, SOLI 2013, KDD 2014, and SDM 2015 conferences and the 2019 Computing Community Consortium / Schmidt Futures Computer Science for Social Good White Paper Competition. He self-published a book entitled 'Trustworthy Machine Learning in 2022, available at http://www.trustworthymachinelearning.com. He is a senior member of the IEEE.
Demetrios Brinkmann
Host
Demetrios is one of the main organizers of the MLOps community and currently resides in a small town outside Frankfurt, Germany. He is an avid traveller who taught English as a second language to see the world and learn about new cultures. Demetrios fell into the Machine Learning Operations world, and since, has interviewed the leading names around MLOps, Data Science, and ML. Since diving into the nitty-gritty of Machine Learning Operations he felt a strong calling to explore the ethical issues surrounding ML. When he is not conducting interviews you can find him making stone stacking with his daughter in the woods or playing the ukulele by the campfire.
Krishnaram Kenthapadi
Host
Krishnaram Kenthapadi is the Chief Scientist of Fiddler AI, an enterprise startup building a responsible AI and ML monitoring platform. Previously, he was a Principal Scientist at Amazon AWS AI, where he led the fairness, explainability, privacy, and model understanding initiatives in the Amazon AI platform. Prior to joining Amazon, he led similar efforts at the LinkedIn AI team and served as LinkedIn’s representative on Microsoft’s AI and Ethics in Engineering and Research (AETHER) Advisory Board. Previously, he was a Researcher at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Lab. Krishnaram received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2006. He serves regularly on the program committees of KDD, WWW, WSDM, and related conferences, and co-chaired the 2014 ACM Symposium on Computing for Development. His work has been recognized through awards at NAACL, WWW, SODA, CIKM, ICML AutoML workshop, and Microsoft’s AI/ML conference (MLADS). He has published 50+ papers, with 4500+ citations and filed 150+ patents (70 granted). He has presented tutorials on privacy, fairness, explainable AI, and responsible AI at forums such as KDD ’18 ’19, WSDM ’19, WWW ’19 ’20 '21, FAccT ’20 '21, AAAI ’20 '21, and ICML '21.