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Re:The crisis of American forensics by throwaway2048 on Friday February 09, 2018 @06:06AM (#16339353)
Until your statistical algorithm decides that black=crime due to the data sets its been fed, and nobody dares question the wisdom of the computer.

Before you reply that detectives might/would have done that anyways, the point is that at least that is identifiable and addressable, how do you determine how a neural net makes its decisions?

Re:The crisis of American forensics by Sacho on Friday February 09, 2018 @07:38AM (#16339724)
> Before you reply that detectives might/would have done that anyways, the point is that at least that is identifiable and addressable

I think you're handwaving the difficulty of identifying and addressing bias and discrimination. I'm not sure it's any easier to do for people than for computers. Computers have a huge advantage here because we can open up their brain and examine how they think, and once we create one that suits our tastes, we can replicate it faithfully. Humans are much more of a black box than a neural net would ever be.

Re:The crisis of American forensics by asynchrony on Friday February 09, 2018 @11:32PM (#16345900)
That's a very real danger. As much as I can side with the desire to have a human in the loop to observe the system, I'm not sure I trust any particular human to be free of bias or immune to emotional reactions that result in incorrect intuitions.
Re:The crisis of American forensics by maxerickson on Friday February 09, 2018 @10:54AM (#16341097)
A statistical model will tend to measure bias in the data.

If some parameter is well correlated with the bias, the model will discount that parameter.

It's not magic, it isn't going to just erase the bias, but a reasonable model will reduce bias rather than reinforcing it.

Re:The crisis of American forensics by sovok_x on Friday February 09, 2018 @06:33AM (#16339436)
There are many algorithms already that render ANNs into decision trees and other interpretable forms. Nothing to fear here, citizen.
Re:The crisis of American forensics by throwaway2048 on Friday February 09, 2018 @06:34AM (#16339440)
show me some, that approach is at best experimental as far as I'm aware, and unable to create a 1:1 correspondence with how an ANN classifies.

A far cry from "many algorithms" like its some kind of well established practice and fact.

Re:The crisis of American forensics by sovok_x on Friday February 09, 2018 @06:59AM (#16339544)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.09784

https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.01785

https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.00935

https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.04595

https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.01693

https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.02531

https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.03781

https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.07535

https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.02540

https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.02518

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/977279/

etc

It is kind of far cry from established practice but how far cry from established implementation are your fears of unintended abuse? It's not nearly at the point yet to be paranoid. Having bugs in ANN before debugging makes them no different from usual software that is already used in forensic research. And nobody in their right mind will deploy networks that impossible or prohibitively difficult to debug for any kind of critical tasks. Otherwise irrational people can abuse power even without any software or ANNs.