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University of Washington computer science professor emeritus Pedro Domingos. (UW Photo)

The University of Washington computer science department denounced comments made online by a retired professor over a debate about AI ethics, Timnit Gebrus controversial exit at Google, so-called cancel culture, and more.

A heated back-and-forth involving longtime AI researcher Pedro Domingos and the response from the UW demonstrates the complexity of public discourse on controversial topics. It also highlights unanswered questions related to the societal implications of artificial intelligence, and is the latest example of the backlash that can occur when politics collides with academia and the tech industry.

Domingos, who joined the UW faculty in 1999 and is the author of The Master Algorithm,sparked the initial discussion on Twitter after hequestioned why the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference was using ethics reviews for submitted papers.

Its alarming that NeurIPS papers are being rejected based on ethics reviews,' he tweeted last week. How do we guard against ideological biases in such reviews? Since when are scientific conferences in the business of policing the perceived ethics of technical papers?

His opinion drew a number of responses from other top data scientists and those involved with NeurIPS.

The problem here is that folks like him lack the humility to admit that they do not have skills in qualitative work and dismiss it all as a slippery slope,' tweeted Rumman Chowdhury, founder of Parity and former global lead for Responsible AI at Accenture Applied Intelligence. Qualitative methods have rigor. Ethical assessment can be generalizable and sustainable.

The discourse on Twitter then shifted to last years decision to rename NeurIPS. There were concerns over the previous name NIPS due to racial slurs and sexism.

That set off the beginning of a long exchange between Domingos and Anima Anandkumar, a professor at Caltech and director of machine learning research at NVIDIA who led a petition to change the name of the conference. Pornography came up in a discussion about web search results for the term nips, sparking a response from Katherine Heller, chair of diversity and inclusion for NeurIPS 2020, and Ken Anderson, chair at the University of Colorados computer science department.

As of Tuesday, Anandkumars Twitter was no longer active. She declined to comment for this story.Update:Anandkumar posted a public apology on her blog Wednesday. She also said she deactivated her Twitter account in the interest of my safety and to reduce anxiety for my loved ones.

NeurIPS posted a statement on ethics, fairness, inclusivity and code of conduct on its homepage. Weve reached out to the conference for comment.

Having observed recent discussions taking place across social media, we feel the need to reiterate that, as a community, we must be mindful of the impact that statements and actions have on our peers, and future generations of AI / ML students and researchers, it reads. It is incumbent upon NeurIPS and the AI / ML community as a whole to foster a collaborative, welcoming environment for all. Therefore, statements and actions contrary to the NeurIPS mission and its Code of Conduct cannot and will not be tolerated.

The Twitter chatter also delved into the recent departure of Gebru, a top AI ethics researcher at Google, and whether she was fired by the company or resigned following a controversy related to an AI ethics paper. Domingos tweeted that Gebru was creating a toxic environment within Google AI and said that she was not fired, despite Gebru stating otherwise.

Heller then tweeted at Domingos and said he was violating the NeurIPS code of conduct.

Later that evening, the UWs Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering issued a lengthy statement via Twitter. The schools leadership took issue with Domingos engaging in a Twitter flame war belittling individuals and downplaying valid concerns over ethics in AI, and for his use of the word deranged. Heres the statement in full:

#UWAllen leadership is aware of recent discussions involving Pedro Domingos, a professor emeritus (retired) in our school. We do not condone a member of our community engaging in a Twitter flame war belittling individuals and downplaying valid concerns over ethics in AI. We object to his dismissal of concerns over the use of technology to further marginalize groups ill-served by tech. While potential for harm does not necessarily negate the value of a given line of research, none of us should be absolved from considering that impact. And while we may disagree about approaches to countering such potential harm, we should be supportive of trying different methods to do so.

We also object in the strongest possible terms to the use of labels like deranged. Such language is unacceptable. We urge all members of our community to always express their points of views in the most respectful and collegial manner.

We do encourage our scholars to engage vigorously on matters of AI ethics, diversity in tech and industry-research relations. All are crucial to our field and our world. But we are all too familiar with counterproductive, inflammatory, and escalating social-media arguments.

We have asked Pedro to make clear he tweets as an individual, not representing the Allen School or the University of Washington. We would further argue that this whole mode of discourse is damaging and unbecoming.

The Allen School is committed to addressing AI ethics and equity in concrete ways. That work is ongoing, and many of our activities are listed on our website.

One key component is to expand the inclusion of ethics in our curriculum and prepare students to consider the very real impact that technology can have, especially on marginalized communities.

In recent years, we have added multiple classes on this topic at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, and we plan to continue to work toward expanding that aspect of our curriculum.

As a school, we have stated our commitment to be more inclusive and to consider the impact of our work on people and communities. We will not be deterred, by naysayers inside or outside of our community, from putting in the hard work required to achieve those aims.

Signed,Members of the Allen School LeadershipMagdalena Balazinska, Prof. and DirectorDan Grossman, Prof. and Vice DirectorTadayoshi Kohno, Prof. and Associate Director for Diversity, Equity & InclusionEd Lazowska, Prof. and Associate Director for Development & Outreach

Domingos described the schools response as cowering before the Twitter mob.

We followed up with Magdalena Balazinska, a well-regarded researcher and educator who took over as the Allen School director last year. Heres what she had to say about the matter:

As leader of the Allen School, one of my highest priorities is to promote a culture and an environment that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive. I also deeply care about an environment in which people discuss issues, even potentially controversial ones, openly, with empathy, and without bullying. Witnessing what happened on Twitter this past week was disheartening. We need to find ways to come together. The entire tech industry should work toward all these goals, and we have much work to do.

Ed Lazowska, a longtime leader at the Allen School, said the department is committed to academic freedom and freedom of speech.

We encourage good-faith dialogue, including on controversial issues, he said. But we expect members of our community to engage in that dialogue in a respectful, collegial, and constructive manner that is free from personal attacks and is not dismissive of peoples lived experiences. Pedro failed to live up to those standards and we felt compelled to make clear where we stand.

Lazowska added: Pedro is within his rights to tweet. We felt it was important to distance the school from his views.

In an email exchange with GeekWire, Domingos said the Allen School should have stood by my right to voice my opinions, and back me up in my efforts to free the machine learning community from the miasma descending on it.

Instead, they chose to pay their obeisance to the ultra-left crowd, as they have before, Domingos said, referencing Stuart Reges, another UW computer science professor who was criticized for his 2018 essay that claimed women are underrepresented in software engineering because of personal preference, not because institutional barriers deter them from pursuing careers in tech.

Reges told GeekWire he was disappointed that the Allen School has thrown Pedro under the bus.

He has raised significant questions about the activism surrounding Timnit Gebrus termination from Google and new efforts to inject ethics reviews into all aspects of AI research, said Reges. The greatest sin he has committed has been to refer to deranged activists. The unified mob reaction to try to cancel him proves that his opponents and the Allen School leadership are not willing to engage in meaningful dialog to explore the issues.

Domingos said the Twitter spat highlights how the machine learning community is being progressively strangled by political correctness and extreme left-wing politics.

The larger problem is that academia and the tech industry, not just machine learning, are being strangled by a crowd that refuses to allow the free exchange of ideas on which research depends, and is successfully imposing an increasingly far-left orthodoxy, he told GeekWire. People live in fear of their attacks.

Daniel Lowd, an associate professor at the University of Oregon who earned his PhD from the UW in 2010, tweeted that he would like to publicly disavow and distance myself from these comments by my PhD advisor and collaborator.

The reaction to Domingos original tweet about ethics reviews of AI papers also reflects the pressing dilemma of AI ethics as the technology increasingly infiltrates everyday life.

Considering the ethical impact of AI research is absolutely essential, said Oren Etzioni, a UW computer science professor emeritus (retired) who is now CEO of Seattles Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence.

That said, its hard to argue with Pedros observations about online attacks and the refusal to allow the free exchange of ideas, said Etzioni, who noted that he was speaking to GeekWire as an individual and not a representative of any institution.

Etzioni called out a platform his father launched called Civil Dialogues that encourages deliberation on pressing issues. He also noted his Hippocratic oath created in 2018 as a way to encourage AI software developers to remember their ethical burden.

Asked about Domingos comments on Twitter, Seattle University senior instructor and AI ethics expert Nathan Colaner said it seems that his underlying attitude is that ethical concerns in AI are overblown, and that ethicists are making too much of their concerns, specifically when it comes to algorithmic bias.

I think thats the wrong attitude to have, Colaner said. First of all, there is no legitimate debate to be had about whether algorithms are neutral. It is also now clear that AI is not going to remove human bias, as we sometimes used to hear. But what is still unclear is whether human bias is a worse or less bad problem than algorithmic bias.

Colaner said there are plenty of unanswered questions that need answers as AI innovation continues at a rapid pace. The AI ethics community is basically scrambling, he said, adding that he supports the Allen Schools statement. Colaner is managing director of the Initiative in Ethics and Transformative Technologies, an institute at Seattle U made possible through a donation from Microsoft.

Healthy debate sharpens everyones minds, Colaner said, but since we in the AI ethics community have serious, time-sensitive work to do, distraction is not useful, which is why Twitter made the unfollow button.

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Retired UW computer science professor embroiled in Twitter spat over AI ethics and cancel culture - GeekWire

December 16, 2020

Computer science professor Gloria Childress Townsend has been named a distinguished member of the Association for Computing Machinery, the worlds largest scientific and educational computing society.

Townsend, who has taught at DePauw for 40 years, is one of only four educators recognized for outstanding educational contributions to computing. Sixty other computer scientists were recognized for their engineering and scientific contributions.

To win this award is a true honor, Townsend said by email.

The association is a U.S.-based international society that has nearly 100,000 members. Its president, Gabriele Kotsis, said in a news release that the distinguished member designation celebrates specific contributions of these members and their career growth as reflected in a long-term commitment to the field, as well as their collaboration with peers in supporting a global professional association for the benefit of all.

Townsend has four degrees from Indiana and Purdue universities, and her research and teaching interests are evolutionary computing, robotics, computing ethics and gender issues of computing. Her concern for underrepresented people in computing led her to founding and sponsoring several DePauw student organizations, such as the Women in Computer Science Club and Students of Color in Computing.

She and associate professor Khadija Stewart invite first-year women to a content-preview session, where they are helped by female upperclass students and learn what to expect if they take Computer Science I. They also help students apply for scholarships to attend the annual conferences for women in computing, and DePauw students have been particularly successful at securing funding.

As a result of these initiatives, women typically make up a larger percentage of computer science majors at DePauw than most institutions of higher learning. According to the National Girls Collaborative Project, only 18 percent of computer science degrees awarded nationwide go to women. But in DePauws Class of 2017, 47% of the computer science degrees were awarded to women. In 2020, 37% of computer science graduates were women and, in 2021, 38% of prospective computer science graduates are women.

Townsend supports women in computing outside DePauw as well. Among other things, she proposed the association hold annual regional celebrations to support women in computing and she organized the first one in Indiana in 2004. She wrote the application and was principal investigator for a $1.2 million National Science Foundation grant to increase the number of celebrations to 16, including several outside the United States.

See the original post:

Computer science prof Townsend recognized for educational contributions - DePauw University

A transformative gift from Ann S. Bowers 59 a Silicon Valley champion and longtime philanthropist will establish the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, supporting Cornells preeminence in these fields.

Her nine-figure commitment will provide the enabling support for the construction of a new building for the Faculty ofComputing and Information Science (CIS). The building will accommodate sorely needed growth in CIS, where half of all Cornell undergraduates take at least one class and enrollment is increasing at a pace unmatched anywhere at the university. It will also ultimately provide significant endowment support for faculty and students in CIS.

Bowers led human resources at Intel Corporation in the 1970s and was one of Apples first vice presidents in the 1980s. She spent her career developing and fostering an environment where technologists could thrive. It is thus especially meaningful that her gift supports CIS at Cornell, which, when created 21 years ago, was one of the nations first programs to combine computer science, with its emphasis on technology, and information science, with its focus on the ways technology impacts humanity.

Ann S. Bowers 59, whose gift will establish a new college of computing and information science.

Today, CIS also incorporates statistics and data science, and faculty from those three departments will make up the new college. Students who pursue its majors will apply to Cornell through other colleges, as they do now.

Anns generosity and her passion for nurturing scholarship have already touched the lives of countless Cornellians, President Martha E. Pollack said. This new gift creates so many exciting possibilities for our faculty and students to learn and to create knowledge in one of the best programs of computing and information science in the world one that has always emphasized both the design and creation of technology, and an understanding of its social impact. The Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science will be a fitting tribute to Anns many achievements.

In addition to her professional accomplishments, Bowers has been an active philanthropist for many years. After the death of her husband, Robert Noyce, in 1990, the Noyce family established The Noyce Foundation, where Ann chaired the board. She has alsobeen a longtime dedicated volunteer and generous benefactor for Cornell, giving more than $20 million over three decades.

Her influential gifts have included support for the construction of Gates Hall CISs current home as well as for Cornell faculty and students in the liberal arts, science, technology, engineering and math, including endowed professorships and research scholarships. She served as trustee and a member of the Presidents Council of Cornell Women and numerous Cornell advisory boards. She chaired the Cornell Silicon Valley Advisors, where she passionately sought to galvanize the universitys presence in her Bay Area community.

The Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science will be a fitting tribute to Anns many achievements.

President Martha E. Pollack

Anns love for Cornell, her experience during the foundational days of Silicon Valley, her commitment to education in math and science to me this gift is a lovely coalescing of the many different strands of her life, said Bowerss friend and fellow alumni volunteer Rebecca (Beckie) Robertson 82, who serves on the Cornell Board of Trustees and the Cornell Engineering Council, and worked with Bowers through the Cornell Silicon Valley Advisors. Shes a very generous leader who cares deeply about mentoring the next generation.

The new college will be the first at Cornell named for a woman a fittinghonor for a college with a female dean, Kavita Bala, professor of computer science; at a university led by a female president, Pollack, who is also a computer scientist; and where 43% of CIS majors are women, far above the national average.

The creation of CIS was 20 years ahead of its time. We believed computing and information technology would have a profound impact on life and society, and our unique multidisciplinary structure now serves as a model to other academic institutions, Bala said. This is an exciting time in technology, with amazing opportunities and hard problems. This incredibly generous gift will propel Cornell to lead the way in addressing the technological and societal challenges of our time.

Events celebrating the gift and the new college are being planned for next year.

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Gift from Ann S. Bowers '59 creates new college of computing and information science | Cornell Chronicle - Cornell Chronicle

In some ways, learning to program a computer is similar to learning a new language. It requires learning new symbols and terms, which must be organized correctly to instruct the computer what to do. The computer code must also be clear enough that other programmers can read and understand it.

In spite of those similarities, MIT neuroscientists have found that reading computer code does not activate the regions of the brain that are involved in language processing. Instead, it activates a distributed network called the multiple demand network, which is also recruited for complex cognitive tasks such as solving math problems or crossword puzzles.

However, although reading computer code activates the multiple demand network, it appears to rely more on different parts of the network than math or logic problems do, suggesting that coding does not precisely replicate the cognitive demands of mathematics either.

Understanding computer code seems to be its own thing. Its not the same as language, and its not the same as math and logic, says Anna Ivanova, an MIT graduate student and the lead author of the study.

Evelina Fedorenko, the Frederick A. and Carole J. Middleton Career Development Associate Professor of Neuroscience and a member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, is the senior author of the paper, which appears today in eLife. Researchers from MITs Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Tufts University were also involved in the study.

Language and cognition

A major focus of Fedorenkos research is the relationship between language and other cognitive functions. In particular, she has been studying the question of whether other functions rely on the brains language network, which includes Brocas area and other regions in the left hemisphere of the brain. In previous work, her lab has shown that music and math do not appear to activate this language network.

Here, we were interested in exploring the relationship between language and computer programming, partially because computer programming is such a new invention that we know that there couldnt be any hardwired mechanisms that make us good programmers, Ivanova says.

There are two schools of thought regarding how the brain learns to code, she says. One holds that in order to be good at programming, you must be good at math. The other suggests that because of the parallels between coding and language, language skills might be more relevant. To shed light on this issue, the researchers set out to study whether brain activity patterns while reading computer code would overlap with language-related brain activity.

The two programming languages that the researchers focused on in this study are known for their readability Python and ScratchJr, a visual programming language designed for children age 5 and older. The subjects in the study were all young adults proficient in the language they were being tested on. While the programmers lay in a functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) scanner, the researchers showed them snippets of code and asked them to predict what action the code would produce.

The researchers saw little to no response to code in the language regions of the brain. Instead, they found that the coding task mainly activated the so-called multiple demand network. This network, whose activity is spread throughout the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain, is typically recruited for tasks that require holding many pieces of information in mind at once, and is responsible for our ability to perform a wide variety of mental tasks.

It does pretty much anything thats cognitively challenging, that makes you think hard, Ivanova says.

Previous studies have shown that math and logic problems seem to rely mainly on the multiple demand regions in the left hemisphere, while tasks that involve spatial navigation activate the right hemisphere more than the left. The MIT team found that reading computer code appears to activate both the left and right sides of the multiple demand network, and ScratchJr activated the right side slightly more than the left. This finding goes against the hypothesis that math and coding rely on the same brain mechanisms.

Effects of experience

The researchers say that while they didnt identify any regions that appear to be exclusively devoted to programming, such specialized brain activity might develop in people who have much more coding experience.

Its possible that if you take people who are professional programmers, who have spent 30 or 40 years coding in a particular language, you may start seeing some specialization, or some crystallization of parts of the multiple demand system, Fedorenko says. In people who are familiar with coding and can efficiently do these tasks, but have had relatively limited experience, it just doesnt seem like you see any specialization yet.

In a companion paper appearing in the same issue of eLife, a team of researchers from Johns Hopkins University also reported that solving code problems activates the multiple demand network rather than the language regions.

The findings suggest there isnt a definitive answer to whether coding should be taught as a math-based skill or a language-based skill. In part, thats because learning to program may draw on both language and multiple demand systems, even if once learned programming doesnt rely on the language regions, the researchers say.

There have been claims from both camps it has to be together with math, it has to be together with language, Ivanova says. But it looks like computer science educators will have to develop their own approaches for teaching code most effectively.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Department of the Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

Read more:

To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language - MIT News

By Matthew HutsonDec. 18, 2020 , 3:45 PM

Somehow, even in a room full of loud conversations, our brains can focus on a single voice in something called the cocktail party effect. But the louder it getsor the older you arethe harder it is to do. Now, researchers may have figured out how to fix thatwith a machine learning technique called the cone of silence.

Computer scientists trained a neural network, which roughly mimics the brains wiring, to locate and separate the voices of several people speaking in a room. The network did so in part by measuring how long it took for the sounds to hit a cluster of microphones in the rooms center.

When the researchers tested their setup with extremely loud background noise, they found that the cone of silence located two voices to within 3.7 of their sources, they reported this month at the online-only Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. That compares with a sensitivity of only 11.5 for the previous state-of-the-art technology. When the researchers trained their new system on additional voices, it managed the same trick with eight voicesto a sensitivity of 6.3even if it had never heard more than four at once.

Such a system could one day be used in hearing aids, surveillance setups, speakerphones, or laptops. The new technology, which can also track moving voices, might even make your Zoom calls easier, by separating out and silencing background noise, from vacuum cleaners to rambunctious children.

More here:

Trouble hearing in a crowded room? New 'cone of silence' could help - Science Magazine