Delving into AI Ethics: My Journey through OLS-7 (Open Seeds)🌱

This image was created by Scriberia for The Turing Way community and is used under a CC-BY licence

Hi! 👋🏾

As part of the Open Life Science mentorship program (Open Seeds), I embarked on a personal mission to understand the impact of AI ethics, policies, and data privacy on AI-related projects.

My goal was to create a valuable resource for people like me who want to grasp these concepts and their influence on society.

Motivation and Objectives

I wanted to better understand AI ethics, policies and strategies, data privacy, their influence on companies like Open AI and why the EU kept pushing new rules. What are they trying to prevent? How would these policies affect African countries? How do these policies affect everyday people?

My objectives for the program were crystal clear (okay, they weren’t at first, and still aren’t but take a look):

1. Get clarity and guidance for my project.
2. Delve into the intriguing realm of AI ethics.
3. Wrap my head around AI policies and strategy documents and how they impact organizations and citizens.
4. Discover the latest best practices for developing ethical AI policies.
5. Uncover any sneaky loopholes lurking within existing AI strategy documents.
6. Compile a report with recommendations to fix those loopholes and strengthen AI policies.

Goals Achieved and Key Findings

I made some progress; here are a couple of things I was able to achieve within the past 15 weeks:

I kicked off an open project

Ethical Implications of AI (GitHub Repo) 🦆

GitHub - gigikenneth/ai-ethical-implications: Comparing AI policies and strategies.

To better understand the impact of the AI strategy documents that I mentioned earlier, I started with a comparative analysis of different AI policies & strategies across different countries with these documents and reviewed them under these themes:

• Healthcare
• Finance
• Education
• Transportation
• Agriculture
• Infrastructure
• Startups/ Tech Ecosystem
• Data Privacy & Public Rights Protection
• Regulations on Private & Public AI Solution Providers
• Others (for any other important aspect of the document that I couldn’t place under the above topics)

Created a repository of AI ethics-related resources

Resources on AI Ethics & Policies 🤖🌟

GitHub - gigikenneth/ai-ethics-resources: Resources on tech and AI ethics.

My understanding of AI ethics has definitely improved compared to when I started.

My mentor, Isil Bilgin, who is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Neuro-AI at Courtois NeuroMod, shared with me a couple of resources I found super helpful. And while reading, I came across a couple more, so I decided to put together a repository that combines them for anyone interested. Currently, these resources are under the following categories:

• Books
• Papers
• Articles
• Influencers
• Organisations
• Newsletters
• Communities
• Courses
• Podcasts
• Webinars/ Videos
• Others (again, for resources that don’t fit into any of these categories)

Created a website that combines both 🦆

Ethical Implications of AI 🦆

The website shows the comparison table for different AI policies across different countries, sorted by continent.

Below that table, you’ll also find the resources listed from the resource repository I discussed above. As the project changes, so will the website, but I have to start somewhere!

Learned about best practices for open science, leadership and community management

Illustration of Healthy Leadership from The Turing Way by Scriberia

During the Open Seeds program, several assignments helped us embrace open leadership practices, including prioritizing accessibility, diversity, inclusion, etc.

I enjoyed working on the Open Canvas, creating a project development plan, roadmap, user personas and pathways. These assignments helped me flesh out my ideas and also gave me the opportunity to try out some things I’ve learned from my product management courses.

Working on my report

While this is a work in progress, as the important thing now is to round off the comparative analysis, my awesome mentor helped guide me on how to work on this. Basically, the template for how this could look is ready, and it’ll cover best practices, loopholes and have actionable recommendations. My focus is on African countries, but this may or may not change as the project progresses.

My OLS Journey and Methodology

Alright, let me tell you how I tackled this project.

• I started by reading research papers handpicked by Isil and other cool ones I came across.
• I also joined communities, subscribed to newsletters and followed influential folks in the AI ethics space to keep up with the latest trends.
• I participated in a couple of the OLS sessions, which were really insightful, and luckily I could follow up on sessions I missed on YouTube.
• Got some guidance on how to kickstart the comparison table, and so I did. The steps look like this:

Isil really kept me motivated through this project because sourcing those strategy documents, reading papers and summarizing them was no joke. It gets boring really fast. I use Groove to help me track the amount of time (one Groove is 50mins long) I spend on tasks, and I’ve lost track of the number of Grooves. 😂

The community were also supportive, and I look forward to seeing their projects at our graduation.

Next Steps and Collaboration Opportunities

So, what’s next for me?

I’ll continue expanding the AI policy database and updating the resources on the project’s website with content. Eventually, I’ll publish that report, complete with recommendations.

If you’d like to join the fun. Feel free to hop on GitHub, create an issue (some are already open), and contribute your thoughts to the spreadsheet. Also, if you have any resources that won’t fit nicely in the AI ethics resources repository, please feel free to contribute to that too!

I could really use a hand with analyzing those non-English AI policy documents, some are in Spanish and Portuguese, and I haven’t even gotten to Europe yet. I need help, please!

Stay Connected and Shout-Outs

Want to stay connected with me and the OLS community? You’ll find me hanging out on the OLS Slack, ready and happy to chat about anything and everything. You can also find me on GitHub or Twitter or LinkedIn, and Email.

Oh, and I can’t forget to give a massive shout-out to the entire OLS team for being so kind and supportive and Isil, who reminds me of Marie Curie for some reason, for being her.

Conclusion

That’s a wrap on my journey so far through my AI ethics project and the OLS (Open Seeds) mentorship program! With newfound knowledge and a dedicated community, I’m committed to building ethical AI products and championing data privacy. Join me in this adventure, and together, we can make a positive impact in the world of AI ethics!

Keep exploring and innovating responsibly! There’s a new cohort for this mentorship program starting in September. You can learn more about it here.

Update

I presented my project and graduated from OLS-7 on the 14th of June, 2023!