Artificial Intelligence: Algorithms, Ethics, and Policy (DHP-P264)

Fall 2023 · DHP P264 · Tufts University · 3 credits · Undergraduate

Artificial intelligence algorithms are designed to assist human decision-making processes ranging from driving, medical diagnoses, and language translation to criminal sentencing, drone targeting, and fraud detection. Each application area where machine learning is applied raises complicated ethical and legal issues of bias, oversight, privacy, accountability, and liability for these algorithms and the resulting automated decision-making they implement. This course aims to introduce students to the technical underpinnings of artificial intelligence so that they can better understand the range of policy options for addressing these issues. Each session will focus on a particular application area of AI and include roughly an hour of discussion of the technical implementation of how machine learning algorithms work in that area—what parameters they use, what data sets they are trained on, what kinds of decisions they make and how—followed by an hour of discussion of the policy and ethical considerations that those algorithms raise and how they might be addressed.

Course codes: DHP-P264

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