Avi Goldfarb, Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare and Professor of Marketing at the Rotman School of Management, joins our weekly seminar series to present work he co-authored with Hilary Evans Cameron and Leah Morris.
Talk title
“Artificial intelligence for a reduction of false denials in refugee claims”
Abstract
Deciding refugee claims is a paradigm case of an inherently uncertain judgment and prediction exercise. Yet refugee status decision-makers may underestimate the uncertainty inherent in their decisions. A feature of recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) is the ability to make uncertainty visible. By making clear to refugee status decision-makers how uncertain their predictions are, AI could help to reduce their confidence in their conclusions.
As it now stands, this would only hurt claimants, since countries around the world have designed their refugee status determination systems to resolve decision-making uncertainty at the claimant’s expense. Increasing uncertainty would therefore contribute to mistaken rejections. If, however, international refugee law was to recognize an obligation under the UN Convention to resolve decision-making doubt in the claimant’s favour, as Evans Cameron has recently advocated, then by making uncertainty visible, AI could help to ensure that fewer refugees were wrongly denied the protection they need.
Moreover, in many countries around the world, refugee claims are decided in legal proceedings governed by the logic of inductive inference, a form of reasoning that profoundly distorts risk assessment. Under Evans Cameron’s proposed risk-assessment model of refugee status decision-making, one based on abductive rather than inductive inference, AI’s ability to make uncertainty visible would indeed help to resolve doubt in the claimant’s favour, as the drafters of the Convention intended.
Recommended reading
A. Goldfarb, H. Evans Cameron, L. Morris. “Artificial intelligence for a reduction of false denials in refugee claims” (PDF). May 2020.
About Avi Goldfarb
Avi Goldfarb is the Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare, and Professor of Marketing, at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. He is also Chief Data Scientist at the Creative Destruction Lab, Senior Editor at Marketing Science, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Goldfarb received his PhD in economics from Northwestern University. His research focuses on the opportunities and challenges of the digital economy. Goldfarb has published academic articles in marketing, statistics, law, management, medicine, computing, and economics. His work on online advertising won the INFORMS Society of Marketing Science Long Term Impact Award, and he has testified before the US Senate Judiciary Committee on competition and privacy in digital advertising. Goldfarb is a co-author of the bestselling book Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence.
About the SRI Seminar Series
The SRI Seminar Series brings together the Schwartz Reisman community and beyond for a robust exchange of ideas that advance scholarship at the intersection of technology and society. Seminars are led by a leading or emerging scholar and feature extensive discussion.
Each week, a featured speaker will present for 45 minutes, followed by 45 minutes of discussion. Registered attendees will be emailed a Zoom link approximately one hour before the event begins. The event will be recorded and posted online.
Avi Goldfarb