Colloquium: Prof. César A. Hidalgo

Wednesday, Nov 3, 2021, at 12.15 - 13.30
Room RZ F 21 or Online, Zoom | Sign up here

How Humans Judge Machines

Enlarged view: Colloquium: César A. Hidalgo

How would you feel about losing your job to a machine? How about a tsunami alert system that fails? Would you react differently to acts of discrimination performed by a machine or a human? How about public surveillance? How Humans Judge Machines compares people’s reactions to actions performed by humans and machines. Using data collected in dozens of experiments, this book reveals the biases that permeate human-machine interactions. Are there conditions in which we judge machines unfairly? Is our judgment of machines affected by the moral dimensions of a scenario? Is our judgment of machines correlated with demographic factors, such as education or gender?

Hidalgo and colleagues use hard science to take on these pressing technological questions. Using randomized experiments, they create revealing counterfactuals and build statistical models to explain how people judge A.I., and whether we do it fairly or not. Through original research, they bring us one step closer to understanding the ethical consequences of artificial intelligence. How Humans Judge Machines can be read for free at external page https://www.judgingmachines.com/ (in print with MIT Press).

About Prof. Dr. César A. Hidalgo

César A. Hidalgo is a Chilean-Spanish-American scholar known for his contributions to economic complexity, data visualization, and applied artificial intelligence.

Hidalgo leads the Center for Collective Learning at the Artificial and Natural Intelligence Institute (ANITI) of the University of Toulouse. He is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Manchester and a Visiting Professor at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Between 2010 and 2019 Hidalgo led MIT’s Collective Learning group, climbing through the ranks from Assistant to Associate Professor. Prior to working at MIT, Hidalgo was a research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Hidalgo is also a founder of Datawheel, an award winning company specialized in the creation of data distribution and visualization systems. He holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Notre Dame and a Bachelor in Physics from Universidad Católica de Chile.

Hidalgo’s contributions have been recognized with numerous awards, including the 2018 Lagrange Prize and three Webby Awards. Hidalgo's is also the author of dozens of peer-reviewed papers and of three books: Why Information Grows (Basic Books, 2015), The Atlas of Economic Complexity (MIT Press, 2014), and How Humans Judge Machines (MIT Press, 2021)

The presentation of the talk is available for protected page download (access for ETH members only).

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