Culture as a Lens on Responsible AI
Presented by Dr. Prabhakaran
Dr. Prabhakaran is a Staff Research Scientist at Google’s Responsible AI and Human Centered Technologies organization, and co-lead the interdisciplinary Technology, AI, Society and Culture (TASC) team. Before Google, he was a postdoc at Stanford University, and obtained his PhD from Columbia University. His prior research focused on building scalable ways using language technologies to identify and address large-scale societal issues such as racial disparities in policing, workplace incivility, and online abuse. He has published over 50 articles in top-tier venues such as the PNAS, ACL, TACL, NAACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, and FAccT.
Abstract
AI technologies are often developed within mono-cultural development contexts, but are meant to interact with multi-cultural usage contexts with divergent values, knowledge systems, and interpretive practices. In this talk, I will present our research that uses culture as a lens on responsible AI, and demonstrate its crucial influence along various dimensions: culture as reflected in data, cultural values and norms that we encode in our models, and cultural knowledge systems we rely on for evaluation of our models. More specifically, we demonstrate how geo-cultural differences shape what language is deemed abusive, stereotypical, or offensive, and where AI models fail in detecting them.