My experience as a Columbia researcher
I began conducting research at Columbia University in the beginning of 2021.
Here are my regrets.
Table of Contents
What did I do?
I used natural language processing to deduplicate medical data processed by my school's medical center.
I designed pivot tables that could process 1,000,000 records at once because we had a lot of medical data to process but a slow user interface.
Why did I do it?
I came into research with the assumption that my work would be free and open to all. My goal was, and still is, to use AI to grow and nurture global communities.
Why do I feel bad?
I want to use AI to help people. My research from 2021 hurt people.
In the process of labeling and training on medical data, I reinforced social constructs like gender and race to a disgusting extent. I was disgusted during team meetings where we would discuss using (in my mind) somewhat derogatory labels for patient data, but I held my tongue.
The results of the work I performed for my university are not open to the public. The code is very much closed-source.
Why didn't I say anything about how I felt?
During my experience as a Columbia student (which is about to end), I found myself at the bottom of a very tall ladder.What now?
Today, it is December 17 of 2021. I want to talk about the ideas I have for the rest of this year and the next.
AI for gender self-determination
- Allow trans people to see what they may look like with top surgery using computer vision
- Allow trans people to change their voices to a more ideal pitch in real time during videoconferences
AI for accessibility
- Reimagine spatial computing for all people, disabled people included
- Add reader specific alt text to images
- Explain images through text - allowing for visual question answering - so that those who don’t see images can still understand them
AI for self-expression
- Run code from recent computer vision papers on resource constrained devices so that everyone can make AI art, not just the wealthy
Mary Grey says that hope stretches the limits of what is possible. I want to make humane AI possible.