Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Surveillance

The Alleyn’s Celebration of Science continued with an exploration of the fascinating worlds of Big Data, AI and Surveillance. Former Global Head of eCommunications Surveillance Technology at Credit Suisse, Jenny Chong, gave a captivating discussion exploring technology dichotomy and its impact on climate change and the fascinating subject of if AI is racist or fair.

Jenny began her talk with a run-down of her career and interests – from her dreams of being a pilot at the age of 12 to how she went on to study Maths and Statistics at LSE and join the world of banking where she began to play with robots. Jenny now heads up an innovation project which helps migrants transfer money to their home countries, as well as working with Imperial College students to nurture their ideas into start-ups whilst also working at an NHS Hospital in Kent on projects in cancer research and radiology.

Taking us into the world of AI, Jenny highlighted different views between generations of what AI is and how it is seen to be used – from older people’s concerns that it is designed to control us to younger people’s views that it is not threatening but, in fact, very useful.

She impressed upon an engrossed audience that machines act like a mirror. Just as babies learn their behaviour from what they are shown, machines learn everything from their human teachers. Jenny explained how this, in turn, means our prejudices and biases, including unconscious biases, are reflected in the way they work too.

Jenny talked about how these biases can then impact on decisions such as, should you be given that mortgage or how much pain relief you should receive. And she cited the example of how a few years ago, if you used a search engine to look up gorillas, the results, shockingly, would have brought up black people too. One of the many solutions to overcoming this, she said, is to ensure there is diversity across the entire pipeline – from the data sets used to train machines, to those creating the algorithms and those analysing the data. She argued the need to ensure AI is responsible if it is used to make decisions.

Pupils and staff were keen to ask Jenny plenty of insightful questions from ‘what are agents?’ to ‘will machines take over humans?’

Thank you, Jenny for a remarkable insight into a fascinating world.