DigitALL: Innovation at EPFL for explainable and equitable AI

Vinitra Swamy © Alain Herzog / 2023 EPFL It's International Women's Day 2023 and this year the focus is on innovation, technological change and education in the digital age for gender equality. New research from EPFL's School of Computer and Communication Sciences aims to break gender and other biases. In 1597 during the Enlightenment, in his work Meditationes Sacrae, the British philosopher Francis Bacon coined the phrase 'knowledge is power'. Four hundred years on, never has it been more important to have the knowledge and skills to address some of the core challenges faced by humanity today. Education is key to gaining this knowledge and as we celebrate International Women's Day, with a spotlight on education in the digital age, how can we ensure educational equality, free from the known bias contained within the machine learning algorithms that drive artificial intelligence? PhD candidate Vinitra Swamy, in the Machine Learning for Education Laboratory led by Assistant Professor Tanja Käser, works on neural networks, pervasive as the general form of artificial intelligence models that we see everywhere and behind, for example, ChatGPT. "One key objective of my research with machine learning is educational equality for all. When you look under the hood at what these models learn, you see human biases reflected from the data, leading to strong inequalities like man is to doctor as woman is to nurse.