NSF and Amazon award $1M for healthcare AI integrity

The Fairness in AI program from the National Science Foundation and Amazon is meant to address challenges around bias in machine learning and speech recognition tools. For this third round of Fairness in AI funding that totals $9.5 million in awards, researchers were asked to submit proposals by August 3, 2021. Research led by Duke University, An Interpretable AI Framework for Care of Critically Ill Patients Involving Matching and Decision Trees, was awarded $625,000. In the inaugural Fairness in AI grant announcement, NSF said it works closely with academic research grant recipients to address issues of fairness, transparency and accountability, and to develop bias-free AI systems. It is possible to build systems that are fair and equitable without sacrificing accuracy, say Carnegie Mellon researchers who found that by defining fairness goals up-front in the machine learning process, and then making design choices to achieve that goal, they could address slanted outcomes and keep data precise.