Identifying and mitigating liabilities and risks associated with AI

The Data Exchange Podcast: Andrew Burt on the need for a law firm focused on AI compliance, governance, and incident response.

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In this episode of the Data Exchange I speak with Andrew Burt, Chief Legal Officer at Immuta and co-founder and Managing Partner of BNH.ai¹, a new law firm focused on AI compliance and related topics. As AI and machine learning become more widely deployed, lawyers and technologists need to collaborate more closely so they can identify and mitigate liabilities and risks associated with AI. BNH is the first law firm run by lawyers and technologists focused on helping companies identify and mitigate those risks.

Managing risk in machine learning is a topic I’ve long been interested in. It is a topic I’ve given a few talks and keynotes about. Companies will need to address things like security and privacy, safety and reliability, fairness, transparency and explainability.  I’ve spoken with Andrew about these topics over the years and I consider him a great resource on these issues.

There are numerous examples of models gone awry. In fact there have been books and reports dedicated to such examples. While companies and model builders are much more aware of the need to manage risks, more work needs to be done to create better tools, processes, and teams to minimize potential problems. I’m a firm believer that ML is too important to be left solely in the hands of technologists. We will need tools and processes that are able to integrate team members from other backgrounds (including compliance officers).

Our conversation focused on a range of topics including:

• Why a law firm is the right vehicle for helping companies manage and mitigate risks associated with AI and machine learning.
• The legal profession’s long history in managing risk and regulatory frameworks.
• Model governance.
• Incident response and recovery.

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Related content:

• Harish Doddi: “Understanding machine learning model governance”
• Krishna Gade: “What businesses need to know about model explainability”
• Morten Dahl: “The state of privacy-preserving machine learning”
• Robert Munro: “Human-in-the-loop machine learning”
• Solmaz Shahalizadeh: “Business at the speed of AI: Lessons from Shopify”
• Chris Nicholson: “Next-generation simulation software will incorporate deep reinforcement learning”
• Evan Sparks: “An open source platform for training deep learning models”

[1] I am an advisor to BNH.ai

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