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Daily Archives: April 28, 2019

Report on Algorithmic Risk Assessment Tools in the U.S. Criminal Justice System

This report was written by the staff of the Partnership on AI (PAI) and many of our Partner organizations, with particularly extensive input from the members of PAI’s Fairness, Transparency, and Accountability Working Group. Our work on this topic was initially prompted by California’s Senate Bill 10 (S.B. 10), which would mandate the purchase and use of statistical and machine learning risk assessment tools for pretrial detention decisions, but our work has subsequently expanded to assess the use of such software across the United States.

This report documents the serious shortcomings of risk assessment tools in the U.S. criminal justice system, most particularly in the context of pretrial detentions, though many of our observations also apply to their uses for other purposes such as probation and sentencing. Several jurisdictions have already passed legislation mandating the use of these tools, despite numerous deeply concerning problems and limitations. Gathering the views of the artificial intelligence and machine learning research community, PAI has outlined ten largely unfulfilled requirements that jurisdictions should weigh heavily and address before further use of risk assessment tools in the criminal justice system. Using risk assessment tools to make fair decisions about human liberty would require solving deep ethical, technical, and statistical challenges, including ensuring that the tools are designed and built to mitigate bias at both the model and data layers, and that proper protocols are in place to promote transparency and accountability. The tools currently available and under consideration for widespread use suffer from several of these failures, as outlined within this document. We identified these shortcomings through consultations with our expert members, as well as reviewing the literature on risk assessment tools and publicly available resources regarding tools currently in use. Our research was limited in some cases by the fact that most tools do not provide sufficiently detailed information about their current usage to evaluate them on all of the requirements in this report. Jurisdictions and companies developing these tools should implement Requirement 8, which calls for greater transparency around the data and algorithms used, to address this issue for future research projects. That said, many of the concerns outlined in this report apply to any attempt to use existing criminal justice data to train statistical models or to create heuristics to make decisions about the liberty of individuals…”

New EPA Report – Preparing for Worsening Disasters Due Climate Change

Guidance about Planning for Natural Disaster Debris – “The Planning for Natural Disaster Debris (PDF)(150 pp, 6 MB, April 2019, EPA-F-19-003) guidance is an update to the version that EPA published in March 2008. It is designed to help all communities (including cities, counties, territories, tribes, etc.) create disaster debris management plans, which EPA strongly… Continue Reading

LC Law Day 2019 Event: “Free Speech, Free Press, Free Society”

“On May 1, 2019 at 1:30 p.m., the Law Library of Congress will present its annual Law Day event. Join Law Librarian of Congress, Jane Sánchez, in a conversation with American Bar Association President, Bob Carlson, for a discussion on this year’s Law Day topic, “Free Speech, Free Press, Free Society.”  Please register for this… Continue Reading

Gallup 2019 Global Emotions Report

Gallup 2019 Global Emotions Report. “View the current snapshot of people’s positive and negative daily experiences based on more than 151,000 interviews with adults in over 140 countries in 2018. Representing the views of citizens from more than 140 countries and areas, this study measures life’s intangibles — feelings and emotions — that traditional economic… Continue Reading

New Site Is Comprehensive Resource for Federal and State Jury Instructions

LawSites – “A new website, Trialdex, is a comprehensive resource for finding and comparing federal and state jury instructions. Formally launched yesterday, the site provides a searchable collection all official or quasi-official federal civil and criminal instructions and annotations, as well as an index of 20,000 legal terms, statutes, CFRs and Supreme Court cases referenced… Continue Reading

Chrome extension simplifies Gmail interface to the bare minimum

Declutter and Simplify Gmail – “A Chrome extension that brings the simplicity of Google Inbox to Gmail. WHO MADE THIS? Simplify was made by me, Michael Leggett (leggett.org), with some help from friends. I was Gmail’s lead designer from 2008 to 2012 and co-founded Google Inbox. I’ve been writing Chrome extensions for years to simplify… Continue Reading

CIA now has an Instagram account

Axios: “The CIA, one of the rare government entities known for its social media savvy, is now on Instagram to give users another look into the secretive agency, Axios’ Marisa Fernandez writes. The new account is another online vehicle to “spark the curiosity of Instagram users” and find recruits, CIA press secretary Timothy Barrett said.… Continue Reading