Practical Steps for Building Fair AI Algorithms

Algorithms increasingly help make high-stakes decisions in healthcare, criminal justice, hiring, and other important areas. This makes it essential that these algorithms be fair, but recent years have shown the many ways algorithms can have biases by age, gender, nationality, race, and other attributes. This course will teach you ten practical principles for designing fair algorithms. It will emphasize real-world relevance via concrete takeaways from case studies of modern algorithms, including those in criminal justice, healthcare, and large language models like ChatGPT. You will come away with an understanding of the basic rules to follow when trying to design fair algorithms, and assess algorithms for fairness. This course is aimed at a broad audience of students in high school or above who are interested in computer science and algorithm design. It will not require you to write code, and relevant computer science concepts will be explained at the beginning of the course. The course is designed to be useful to engineers and data scientists interested in building fair algorithms; policy-makers and managers interested in assessing algorithms for fairness; and all citizens of a society increasingly shaped by algorithmic decision-making

• Understand widely used definitions of fairness and bias
• Master principles to follow when training models
• Design a healthcare algorithm
• Analyze challenging algorithmic fairness dilemmas

• No deep prior experience is required, but basic computer and internet skills are helpful
• Ability to read course instructions in English and complete short practice activities