Women in STEM Award winner profile: Drs. Kathy Powers and Sonia Gipson Rankin
UNM professors consider impacts of algorithms on our lives
Key info: The Algorithmic Justice Project has included classes, speakers, and research on the topic of algorithmic justice, a broad movement to examine and illuminate how algorithms and artificial intelligence are used, often without people knowing.
Quote: “I would say also for the future, in terms of practical governance, I think our legislators will have to have some sort of institute or space in which they have access to AI experts to help them with (the question of) ‘how are you governing something that’s changing every three months?’” – Sonia Gipson Rankin, UNM law professor
Editor’s note: This Women in STEM Award winner profile is part of a series of stories that explores what recipients have been working on since the awards began in 2106. Explore our other winner profiles.
UNM professors consider impacts of algorithms on our lives
A group of UNM professors from law, political science and computer science are working to promote understanding of the role of algorithms in society – and to warn of the potential impacts on everything from policy making to health care.
The group includes Sonia Gipson Rankin, a professor of law; Kathy Powers, an associate professor of political science and associate chair of Africana Studies; and Melanie Moses, a professor of computer science and biology. Together, they have been looking at the positives and negatives of algorithms and artificial intelligence, which form key parts of some of the most profound developments of our time.
The ongoing work stems from a 2022 Women in STEM Award to Gipson Rankin and Powers. So far, the Algorithmic Justice Project has included classes, speakers, and research on the topic of algorithmic justice, a broad movement to examine and illuminate how algorithms and artificial intelligence are used, often without people knowing.
“Today, society can benefit from AI and algorithms and people can also be harmed every day by them – and have no idea,” Powers said.
“And so part of our goal is to educate people about how AI works, where (algorithms) are used, how they work as tools, and how they create challenges at the same time,” she said.
The work also aims to “to help us understand how (AI) can be aids in decision-making, and how (AI) can also be challenging when they are left to make decisions guided by potential biases of other communities.”
Powers said she learned first hand how harmful new technology can be recently when an algorithm used by her insurance company arbitrarily denied coverage for her family member’s medication.
“And within seven days of not having it, this family member had a life-threatening event and was hospitalized, for the first time.” Their recovery lasted two months.
“And it was all avoidable,” she said.
“We are often unaware when algorithms are being used and how they may affect our daily lives.”
The urgency – amid mind blowing developments in the ability of and access to artificial intelligence – is something Powers, Gipson Rankin, and Moses are teaching their students as part of the project.
Teaching UNM students
More than 200 UNM undergrads and graduate level students in several disciplines have had a chance to benefit from classes that are connected to the project.
The classes include Technology and the Law at the law school and International Political Economy in the political science department. They also include Black Minds Matter, African-American Reparations, and the African Diaspora and International Courts in Africana Studies, and computer science classes Complex Adaptive Systems and Social and Ethical Issues in Computing.
Moses said she has enjoyed seeing students eagerly expanding their knowledge.
“Algorithms and AI used to be topics that only computer science students needed to understand. Now it’s clear that everyone, all citizens and consumers, no matter their academic discipline or job, everyone needs to understand how these technologies work and how they affect their lives. And computer scientists need lawyers and social scientists to help us to understand the social impact of algorithms and AI and how to build technology that serves society. It has been inspiring to see how hungry UNM students are to broaden and deepen their understanding of AI.”
People who are comfortable with AI – something that not too long ago seemed like a skill of the future – are needed now for a broad set of careers, Powers said.
“So, for example, even in public policymaking, advocating, community organization work, you cannot make a proposal without having data as evidence,” Powers said. “We have already reached the point that some basic quantitative skills and statistics are required for many jobs.”
Powers said she has already seen this in her field.
“In political science, we use algorithms in our quantitative analyses. And at the same time, we examine their role in politics. It is difficult to participate in this space without an understanding of how algorithms work.”
Researching (what used to be) the future
Members of the group have published a variety of different pieces both jointly and individually. These include op eds, magazine articles, science comments and law reviews.
The published work includes a joint disciplinary scholarship article by members of the group in the Wisconsin Law Review about algorithmic justice, Gipson Rankin said.
“What we decided to look at was traffic enforcement cameras and the way that this kind of particular technology is going to have a disproportionate impact on Black communities and have an economic impact in particular that we needed to really keep our eyes on.”
The published work takes an interdisciplinary look at the issue.
Speakers and activities related to the project
As part of the work, the group has brought several speakers to UNM to give public lectures open to UNM and the Albuquerque community, since 2022 to talk about AI and algorithmic justice from a variety of viewpoints.
They include:
Deleso A. Alford, the Rachel Emanuel Endowed Professor of law at Southern University Law Center, Managing Fellow for Southern University Law Center health Equity Law & Policy Institute,
Mahzarin Banaji, Cabot Professor of Social Ethics in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University,
Jammy Kiggundu, an entertainment and sport law attorney from Houston who is a UNM School of Law alum,
Brandon Ogbunu, an assistant professor in of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University
Moses, Powers and Gipson Rankin also have testified in front of New Mexico lawmakers about the politics of artificial intelligence, the implications of AI in the legal profession and the need for laws governing AI.
Earlier this year, New Mexico passed a new law regulating AI generated deep fakes in election campaigns, one of the first states to do so.
“It is an important first step on a long road to regulating the negative impacts of algorithms and AI on everything from criminal justice, to housing and insurance,” Moses said. “I am hopeful that the Legislature will also consider appropriately encouraging the beneficial uses of AI, for example in medicine and clean energy. New Mexico legislators understand that appropriately balancing regulation and incentives for AI will help us to deal with a complex future,” she said.
Moses and colleagues at other New Mexico universities, Los Alamos and Sandia National Labs, and CNM have founded the New Mexico AI Consortium to advance AI research, education and workforce development in our state.
“We have a tremendous ability to harness the science and engineering expertise of this group, the long history of leading high performance computing, and addressing real world environmental challenges in our diverse state. New Mexico is poised to be a leader in developing AI that benefits science and society,” Moses said.
Looking ahead
Even casual observers of the stunning pace of the growth in AI agree there needs to be oversight, legal guardrails and education, now.
Those involved with creating AI recently warned that the technology poses grave risks to society and makes existing inequalities worse.
It’s a question Powers and others in the group are examining.
“So how do we govern AI?” Powers said. “AI governance requires action from the local level to the international level. International organization resolutions, multi-level government regulation within a country, international agreements between countries, and intra-industry regulation will be required.”
For Gipson Rankin, there’s no doubt lawmakers need to be thinking ahead about technology that’s already here.
“I would say also for the future, in terms of practical governance, I think our legislators will have to have some sort of institute or space in which they have access to AI experts to help them with (the question of) ‘how are you governing something that’s changing every three months?’”
“And I think the future of lawmaking across criminal justice, health, environment, all of these spaces will require also an understanding of the role of AI and (knowledge of) how do we govern it in order to get its benefits and deal with this challenge,” she said.