10-23-2022 W2W - Flipbook - Page 6
Q&A with
Jennifer
Golbeck
A discussion with the director
of the Social Intelligence Lab
at the University of Maryland
By Emily Opilo
PHOTO BY BILLY TIDWELL
J
ennifer Golbeck considers herself a private
person, but she also specializes in technology with the potential to mine personal
information to an unthinkable degree.
As the director of the Social Intelligence Lab at
the University of Maryland, Golbeck studies the
intersection of the two. Her research focuses on
social media-driven analysis and predicting attributes, work that helps her design and build systems
that improve how people interact with information
online — and protect their privacy.
Golbeck spoke with The Baltimore Sun ahead
of her keynote address at the Women to Watch
networking event in October to talk policy, privacy
and how to attract more women to her male-dominated field.
What do people not understand about artificial
intelligence?
We hear the term all over the place. On one hand
we get pushed this Matrix, Terminator AI is going to
dominate the world narrative. And that’s definitely
wrong. AI is really dumb in a lot of ways. We’re
nowhere near and I don’t think we’re ever going to
get near that.
The problem is when you put AI in the hands of
people who can use it to get more power and money,
they can find out all kinds of things about you that
are incredibly invasive and use it to do all sorts of
manipulative or unethical things. That’s happening
right now, but it’s so far behind the scenes that we
don’t know about it a lot of the time. That’s actually
6 | 2022 | WOMEN TO WATCH
the thing we should be worrying about.
How can AI be better incorporated into health
care without incentivizing profits over patient
care?
There’s creepy stuff going on with AI in the health
care space. We see a lot of concern ... about how
[women’s] period tracking data is going to be leveraged. Will companies be running AI to predict that
[a woman] had an abortion and giving that [information] to law enforcement?
At the same time, there’s life changing work being
done. There was one study where they had all this
historical data from a brain and memory clinic. They
trained an algorithm to look at scans and predict if
people would develop Alzheimer’s. The algorithm
could do that with 99% accuracy. It could make that
prediction six years before a human physician would
be able to see it on a scan.
It not that AI is the problem. It’s the application
of it.
AI was put to use during the COVID pandemic.
What lessons did we learn?
Early on in the pandemic, Apple and Google
worked together to come up with a contact tracing
feature in phones. There could be a zillion ways
for that to go wrong, but they came up with some
good privacy respecting ways to do this where your
personal data is not shared.
A lot of people didn’t opt in. It was a totally rational choice given how bad every tech company has
been with using our data. I think everyone has come
out of the pandemic with lower trust in institutions.
In the tech space, there’s very powerful things
we could have done to make this better, and there
was a lack of political will in some places and a wellearned lack of trust in tech companies. This is a real
challenge because if and when the next pandemic
comes along, we’ve learned so much and we’ve got a
lot of great tools that we can use. I think, rightfully, a
lot of people are like, “No way,” and that’s the thing
we have to fix. We need really strong policy change
to protect our privacy, so we know these companies
can’t skirt around what is a right and ethical thing
to do.
How are women represented in your field?
It’s terrible. When I was a graduate student, I was
pretty much always the only woman in the room. It’s
sort of like an old boys network. It’s culturally hard
to be a woman in those spaces. I think people underestimate that a lot of women avoid fields where
they’re constantly told they don’t belong there or
harassed when they are there, whether it’s computer
science or anything else.
We need more women. Lots of places have recognized it’s a problem. It’s a big fight, but we’re trying.
We’re getting kids interested at a young age. I think
working on that cultural shift and having powerful
voices saying “all this bad acting is not OK.” That’s
going to be the really necessary thing to get a big
shift.
(This interview has been edited for space.)