Using AI bias to mitigate poverty
Event is hybrid. Participants may attend in person (T2, Computer Science Building, Aalto University) or online on .
Speaker: Speaker: Georgina Curto
Assistant Research Professor
Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society, University of Notre Dame
Talk Abstract:
While bias mitigation in AI has generated an important body of work, we argue that online bias can be useful to identify and measure shared beliefs that influence social policy making. In this talk, I will outline promising research directions to inform alternative poverty mitigation strategies at a global level. The deceleration in the poverty reduction rates throughout the last decades has evidenced that traditional poverty mitigation policies based on the redistribution of wealth may not be sufficient. Interdisciplinary research, incorporating AI-enabled tools, offers insights that open new paths for poverty mitigation. In this context, I will describe our ongoing work generating a global index of discrimination against the poor (using NLP techniques and LLMs), and research aiming to optimize poverty mitigation policies via AI simulations (using Agent-Based Modeling methods), which we are developing in close collaboration with both local and international non-profits such as the United Nations.
Speaker Bio:
Georgina is an Assistant Research Professor at the , University of Notre Dame. She chairs the Symposia in the Global South and Co-Chair the AI & Social Good Special Track at the.
Focusing on issues of poverty mitigation, fairness and inclusion, she works on the design of AI socio-technical systems that provide new insights to counteract inequality, and more broadly, to advance interdisciplinary research towards the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Georgina conducts research that contributes to the AI state of the art in Natural Language Processing, Agent-Based Modeling, Social Networks and Machine Learning, with the ultimate goal to offer insights for innovative interventions to local and global challenges. Some of these lines of research were awarded and .
Georgina received her Ph.D. in the joint program offered by the universities, and (Cum Laude) for a dissertation on "", during which she was trained into the philosophy of economics, ethics and human development as well on the state of the art on AI. She has studied a Master's Degree in Economics Research from Universitat Ramon Llull and an International Executive M.B.A. (distinction with honors) from IE University Business School, where she was awarded for the Best Entrepreneurial Project.
Previous to her current position at the University of Notre Dame, she worked as a Design Thinking lecturer at EINA (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), as an entrepreneurship consultant for the Barcelona City Council Local Development Agency and she directed her own entrepreneurial project.