ML-NYC Speaker Series and Happy Hour: Daniel Björkegren

The ML in NYC Speaker Series + Happy Hour is excited to host Professor Daniel Björkegren as our December speaker! His talk will take place Wednesday, December 10 at 4pm at the Flatiron Institute. As always, there will be a reception afterward for all attendees.

Title: AI for Low-Income Countries

Abstract: Most AI investment is aimed at people who are already rich, educated, and online. What will AI mean for the billions of people who are not? In this talk, I’ll show what happens when we deploy ML in one of the earliest “AI for the poor” use cases: digital credit scoring for people excluded from formal banks. I’ll then turn to generative AI and how it could transform the delivery of education, health, and other services when bandwidth, data, and infrastructure are scarce. I’ll close with open problems for ML: who is (and isn’t) represented in training data, and how to rigorously measure whether technology does good or harm.

Bio: Daniel Björkegren is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). He works on the economic implications of machine intelligence, particularly in low income countries. His field work is mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics and a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard University, and a Bachelor degree in Physics from the University of Washington. In prior lives he coded the photo app for Microsoft's first smartphone and taught high school math along the Texas-Mexico border.

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