Week 1:

Introduction to Responsible AI

Course Details

Ricardo Baeza-Yates is a professor of the practice at the Institute for Experiential Artificial Intelligence of Northeastern University, Silicon Valley campus, since August 2017. He received a Ph.D. in CS from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 1989. He is also CTO of NTENT, a semantic search technology company. Before, he was VP of Research at Yahoo Labs, based in Barcelona, Spain, and later in Sunnyvale, California, from January 2006 to February 2016. He is co-author of the best-seller Modern Information Retrieval textbook published by Addison-Wesley in 1999 and 2011 (2nd ed), that won the ASIST 2012 Book of the Year award. In 2009 he was named ACM Fellow and in 2011 IEEE Fellow, among other awards and distinctions. His areas of expertise are web search and data mining, information retrieval, data science, and algorithms in general.

Ricardo Baeza-Yates

Learning Objectives

  • Gain a foundational understanding of AI and its ethical implications

  • Understand the guiding pillars of responsible AI.

  • Appreciate the significance of responsible AI in business and society, from a range of practitioner perspectives.

Topics Covered

Defining Responsible AI

  • What it is and what it isn’t

  • Terminology

  • Irresponsible AI

Understanding the Basics of AI

  • AI vs. Human Intelligence

  • Machine Learning Fundamentals

  • Generative AI and the Transformer Model

Responsible AI Pillars

  • Robustness and Reliability

  • Explainability and Transparency

  • Fairness and Bias Mitigation

  • Privacy and Data Protection

  • Accountability and Governance

Perspectives on Responsible AI

  • The Enterprise Perspective

  • The Startup Perspective

  • The Investor Perspective

  • The Policymaking Perspective

Introduction to Ethical Considerations

  • Ethical Frameworks

  • Ethical Decision-Making

  • Impact on Society

Reading Materials

Other Readings: