SoylentNews
SoylentNews is people
https://soylentnews.org/

Title    What the Boston School Bus Schedule Can Teach Us About AI
Date    Monday November 19 2018, @05:11AM
Author    Fnord666
Topic   
from the and-now-for-the-rest-of-the-story dept.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=18/11/18/2220244

upstart writes:

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

Links

  1. "upstart" - https://soylentnews.org/~upstart/
  2. "What the Boston School Bus Schedule Can Teach Us About AI" - https://www.wired.com/story/joi-ito-ai-and-bus-routes/
  3. "pushed back" - http://www.wbur.org/edify/2017/12/09/bps-reschedules-start-times-parents-push-back
  4. "Don't blame the algorithm for doing what Boston school officials asked" - https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2017/12/22/don-blame-algorithm-for-doing-what-boston-school-officials-asked/lAsWv1Rfwqmq6Jfm5ypLmJ/story.html
  5. "That day, the Boston Public Schools decided not to implement the changes" - https://twitter.com/wbur/status/944259416387457024
  6. "Original Submission" - https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=30122

© Copyright 2024 - SoylentNews, All Rights Reserved

printed from SoylentNews, What the Boston School Bus Schedule Can Teach Us About AI on 2024-03-28 14:28:29