Dr. Kenya Andrews Speaks at Howard

Dr. Kenya Andrews, a Provost STEMJazz Postdoctoral Fellow and proud graduate of the Spelman College Dual Degree Engineering Program, is headed to Howard to give a talk on October 16th.  You can watch her in action virtually through this link.  And here’s the abstract!

Title:

 Setting the Record Straight: Causal Discovery, NLP, and LLMs for Mitigating Injustices in Medical Records 

Abstract:

 Traditional approaches to detecting injustices in Machine Learning (ML) (i.e., traditional fairness metrics such as demographic parity or equalized odds) far too often fail to account for historical injustices that have led to the positioning of marginalized people and their nuanced experiences, especially when multiple demographic features interact to cause such injustice. This has led to many cases of injustice being unaccounted for or undetected in various life-critical contexts, such as medical care. In this talk, I argue for the imperative of (1) using an intersectionality lens to uncover and analyze hidden injustices and (2) leveraging the nuanced paths by which injustices occur to (3) strategically improve the visbility of marginalized people to readers (i.e., human experts and LLMs). I discuss how acknowledging points of bias and issues of vulnerability to inform such readers often leads to shifts in downstream effects. Furthermore, by leveraging intersectionality and causal discovery techniques, I show that we can reveal how demographic features (i.e., race, gender, and age) intersect to shape medical decision-making and patient outcomes. My interdisciplinary methods demonstrate how intentional steps toward algorithmic justice can occur to drive meaningful change toward a more just society.