Algorithms, Law, and Policy
Algorithms are deployed “in the wild” in numerous sectors of public and private industry, including medicine, law, education, and employment. Many of these sectors are grappling with how laws and policies are shaped by, responding to, and leveraging this pervasive use of algorithms. The MD4SG Working Group on Algorithms, Law, and Policy focuses on this complex relationship between algorithms and mechanisms on the one hand and law and policy on the other hand. Some of the topics the group will work on include but are not limited to free speech, content moderation, antitrust, the use of “black box” machine learning models, data-driven algorithms, and decision-support tools. We study the real-world impacts of these methods through the lens of law and public policy. We also aim to support law and policy practitioners through, for instance, providing digital forensic expert assistance. This group began meeting in Spring 2021 growing out of the earlier Bias, Discrimination, and Fairness working group.
We meet every other week for a presentation from an invited speaker or group member, followed by a group discussion.
Meeting Speakers
| Gili Vidan | Counterfeit Deterrence | 26 May 2022 |
| Thomas Gilbert | Accountability Infrastructure for Social Media Companies | 19 May 2022 |
| Jake Goldenfein | Law's Consumers and Platform Users | 21 Apr 2022 |
| Bertan Turhan | Implementation of Affirmative Action Policy in India | 07 Apr 2022 |
| Ayse Yasar | Perspectives on the EU Digital Legislative Package | 24 Mar 2022 |
| Alex Sotropo | Computational Antitrust | 10 Mar 2022 |
| Lauren Chambers | Campaigns to Regulate Facial Recognition at the Municipal and State Level | 24 Feb 2022 |
| Shlomi Hod | Pedagogical Interventions in Algorithms, Law, and Policy | 07 Dec 2021 |
| Mandy Lau | Online Speech Moderation as Language Policy | 23 Nov 2021 |
| Logan Stapleton | Risk Assessment Algorithms in U.S. Child Welfare | 09 Nov 2021 |
| Maksim Karliuk | The Role of Proportionality in AI Ethical Frameworks | 24 Oct 2021 |
| Andreas Haupt | Recommender System Design and Mechanism Design | 24 Oct 2021 |
| Burcu Baykurt | Algorithmic Accountability in the City: A Review of Local Policies in the U.S. | 10 Jun 2021 |
| Seth Lazar | Legitimacy, Authority and the Political Value of Explanations | 27 May 2021 |
| Fernando Delgado | Common Task Framework, meet Participatory Design | 13 May 2021 |
| Yoan Hermstrüwer | Governing with Humans and Machines | 29 Apr 2021 |
| Nana Nwachuku | The political influence of social media algorithms | 15 Apr 2021 |
| Kandrea Wade | How we've taught algorithms to see identity: constructing race and gender in image databases for facial analysis (link) | 01 Apr 2021 |
| Ayse Yasar | Antitrust and Big Tech | 18 Mar 2021 |
| Thomas Gilbert | Mapping the Political Economy of Reinforcement Learning Systems: The Case of Autonomous Vehicles (link) | 04 Mar 2021 |
Working Group Organizers
| Joachim Baumann | PhD Student | University of Zurich |
| Xudong Shen | PhD Student | National University of Singapore |