OU Researcher Aims to Clear Biases in AI

OU Researcher Aims to Clear Biases in AI

Dr. Amy McGovern, American Meteorological Society Fellow and School of Meteorology professor, leads the NSF AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography (AI2ES). Recently, McGovern’s work to with biases in artificial intelligence was higlighted in a publication by OU’s Gallogly College of Engineering (McGovern is also a professor of Computer Science, which is housed in GCOE) ahead of an upcoming paper. The paper, which is entitled “Why We Need to Focus on Developing Ethical, Responsible, and Trustworthy AI Approaches for Environmental Sciences” will be published in the inaugural issue of Environmental Data Science, according to the GCOE blog post.

Dr. McGovern’s team is at the forefront of these issues, and they say that AI systems can be just as flawed as the human beings who create them. For instance, weather events that take place in highly populated areas may be more heavily reported than those in isolated areas. Using this data may lead to the AI overpredicting certain events for large cities versus small towns. We trust that AI2ES is going to provide insight into this and many more issues to come!