Mathematician Cathy O’Neil is offering businesses a chance to test their algorithms for fairness.
Opening the black box: As artificial-intelligence systems get more advanced, the logic paths they follow can be difficult or even impossible to understand, creating a so-called “black box.” As these algorithms come to control increasingly important parts of our lives, like whether we get a job or a loan, it is crucial to understand their biases and decisions.
The solution: O’Neil, who wrote the book Weapons of Math Destruction, has started O’Neil Risk Consulting and Algorithmic Auditing to perform third-party audits on algorithms. It examines everything from the people who programmed the software to the training data to the output, flagging any bias in the process.
