Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Monday November 19 2018, @05:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the and-now-for-the-rest-of-the-story dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

What the Boston School Bus Schedule Can Teach Us About AI

When the Boston public school system announced new start times last December, some parents found the schedules unacceptable and pushed back. The algorithm used to set these times had been designed by MIT researchers, and about a week later, Kade Crockford, director of the Technology for Liberty Program at the ACLU of Massachusetts, emailed asking me to cosign an op-ed that would call on policymakers to be more thoughtful and democratic when they consider using algorithms to change policies that affect the lives of residents. Kade, who is also a Director's Fellow at the Media Lab and a colleague of mine, is always paying attention to the key issues in digital liberties and is great at flagging things that I should pay attention to. (At the time, I had no contact with the MIT researchers who designed the algorithm.)

I made a few edits to her draft, and we shipped it off to the Boston Globe, which ran it on December 22, 2017, under the headline "Don't blame the algorithm for doing what Boston school officials asked." In the op-ed, we piled on in criticizing the changes but argued that people shouldn't criticize the algorithm, but rather the city's political process that prescribed the way in which the various concerns and interests would be optimized. That day, the Boston Public Schools decided not to implement the changes. Kade and I high-fived and called it a day.

[...] A few months later, having read the op-ed in the Boston Globe, Arthur Delarue and Sébastien Martin, PhD students in the MIT Operations Research Center and members of the team that built Boston's bus algorithm, asked to meet me. In very polite email, they told me that I didn't have the whole story.

There's more to it than first meets the eye.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20 2018, @03:07AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20 2018, @03:07AM (#764126)

    What? My non-linear programming algorithm is very intelligent. It's so smart that it doesn't have to 'learn' anything else. It was born that way.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_programming [wikipedia.org]