AI at the Margins: Data, Decisions, and Inclusive Social Impact

AI at the Margins: Data, Decisions, and Inclusive Social Impact

Bryan Wilder

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Doctoral Consortium. Pages 6474-6475. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/926

Artificial intelligence holds tremendous promise to improve human well-being. However, AI techniques are typically developed for the benefit of those with access to technological and financial resources. A critical but understudied question is how AI can benefit marginalized communities who lack such resources. Governments and communities worldwide use a range of interventions to tackle social problems such as homelessness and disease, improving access to opportunity for underserved populations. My research develops machine learning and optimization methods to empower such interventions, which are almost always deployed with limited resources and limited information. Maximizing impact in this context requires algorithmic approaches which span the full pipeline from data to decisions. My dissertation presents a set of both technical and application-oriented contributions towards this goal. 
Keywords:
Heuristic Search and Game Playing: Combinatorial Search and Optimisation
Machine Learning: Structured Prediction