Skip to main content
Digital Environment Research Institute (DERI)

Joint DERI/CCLS talk with Fabien Tarissan

When: Thursday, February 3, 2022, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Where:

Speaker: Fabien Tarissan, French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS)

We are delighted that Fabien Tarissan will be presenting on "Bring in the algorithm! The biases of predictive models under scrutiny."

Fabien Tarissan is a researcher in computer science at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and adjunct professor at École Normale Supérieure de Paris-Saclay. He is also currently vice-president of the French Society for Computer Science (SIF) in charge of scientific mediation.

His work mainly concerns the analysis and modeling of large networks encountered in practice, such as the Internet, the web, social networks or legal networks. His research involves in particular the study of recommendation systems such as the ones using machine learning techniques.

Abstract:
While the applications resulting from AI techniques continue to diversify, the law could not escape the trend of automating decision-making. This is manifested in particular by the proposition of using predictive models issued from machine learning (ML) techniques to drive future decisions in judiciary contexts. If the use of these techniques in the courts is legitimately debated, they are on the other hand already used in law firms and, more broadly, in legal branches of private companies in order to establish or support their litigation strategies.

Described in broad terms, the ML approach consists of the analysis of a corpus of legal decisions seeking to identify what are the main characteristics that have been taken into account by the judges in settling the cases. This knowledge is then presented, in a second step, as a useful way to inform forthcoming decisions on new cases.

This talk will be the opportunity to briefly present the concepts at the core of ML techniques before discussing how their efficiency and, more importantly, their potential biases are formally assessed by computer scientists. This will address the question of a possible discrimination in algorithmic recommendations and we will see that different formulations of what could be fair recommendations lead in fact to different biases that are irreconcilable. This will raise the question of how to regulate the use of AI approaches in such a context.

 

Centre for Commercial Law Studies 

About the DERI seminar series
The Digital Environment Research Institute hosts weekly seminars, every Thursday at 11:00 am (UK time), in which QMUL academics and external guests discuss research underpinned by data science and AI. The remit of the seminar series is broad and covers all disciplines and focus areas in which data-driven projects are generating new knowledge and pushing the boundaries of discovery.

Series organizer: Martin Benning, School of Mathematical Sciences

 

Back to top