HAI Policy Resources
AI-Enabled Depression Prediction Using Social Media
Natural language processing for mental health monitoring is an emerging use of AI poised to disrupt the landscape of the health care industry. As the profusion of social media platforms allows for the population to share their thoughts and feelings with the world, users’ posts and reactions extend the scope of medical screening methods for psychological disorders such as depression. Users are already being marketed to with sophistication based on these behaviors — why not leverage these technologies for public health?
Policy Brief, Feb 2021
Domain Shift and Emerging Questions in Facial Recognition Technology
Facial recognition technologies have grown in sophistication and adoption throughout American society. Consumers now use facial recognition technologies (FRT) to unlock their smartphones and cars; retailers use them for targeted advertising and to monitor stores for shoplifters; and, most controversially, law enforcement agencies have turned to FRT to identify suspects. Significant anxieties around the technology have emerged—including privacy concerns, worries about surveillance in both public and private settings, and the perpetuation of racial bias.
Policy Brief, Nov 2020
Evaluating Facial Recognition Technology: A Protocol for Performance Assessment in New Domains
Facial recognition technology has proliferated throughout society – today it helps us unlock smartphones, access our bank accounts, and receive targeted advertising. FRT is also used in high-stakes situations where the output of the software can lead to substantial effects on a person’s life. This has led to a loud call to understand and regulate the technology. We support the call for rigorous reflection of its use and its accuracy. In this white paper, we look to provide a common understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the technology in order to properly assess its risks and benefits.
White Paper, Nov 2020
Preparing for the Age of Deepfakes and Disinformation
Popular culture has envisioned societies of intelligent machines for generations, with Alan Turing notably foreseeing the need for a test to distinguish machines from humans in 1950. Now, advances in artificial intelligence that promise to make creating convincing fake multimedia content like video, images, or audio relatively easy for many. Unfortunately, this will include sophisticated bots with supercharged self-improvement abilities that are capable of generating more dynamic fakes than anything seen before.
Policy Brief, Nov 2020
Modeling Effective Regulation of Facebook
Social Media platforms break traditional barriers of distance and time between people and present unique challenges in calculating the precise value of the transactions and interactions they enable. In the case of a company like Facebook, each layer of connections creates value and attracts additional users to the platform. The compounding nature of this phenomenon gives platformssignificant market power. In the face of growing scrutiny from policymakers, the media, and the public, regulators are now considering a number of proposals to ensure platforms do not abuse their market power or restrict the economic benefits of their networks from being more equitably distributed.
Policy Brief, Oct 2020
Toward Fairness in Health Care Training Data
With advances in AI, researchers can now train computer algorithms to interpret medical images – often with accuracy comparable to physicians. Yet a survey of medical research shows that these algorithms rely on datasets that lack population diversity and could introduce bias into the understanding of a patient’s health condition.
Policy Brief, Oct 2020
AI’s Promise and Peril for the U.S. Government
While the use of AI spans the breadth of the U.S. federal government, government AI remains uneven at best, and problematic and perhaps dangerous at worst.
Policy Brief, Sep 2020
Recovering & Readying Our Economy for the Future
Susan Athey’s Written Testimony to House Budget Committee Hearing on Machines, Artificial Intelligence, & the Workforce. Video
Testimony, Sep 2020
Input on the European Commission White Paper “On Artificial Intelligence – A European approach to excellence and trust”
White Paper by “Wonks and Techies,” a multi-disciplinary group at Stanford University, cooperating on international technology and policy issues, led by Ms. Marietje Schaake.
Paper, June 2020