Computing and Information Science's Jon Kleinberg continues to confront and inform key policy concerns using computational methods. With help from Kleinberg and his fellow researchers – including Cornell Computer Science PhD Manish Raghavan, ProPublica critiques an algorithm used in the criminal courts to forecast future criminal behavior. Research has found that the formula, and others like it, "have been written in a way that guarantees black defendants will be inaccurately identified as future criminals more often than their white counterparts."
This latest piece follows up on Kleinberg's editorial in the Harvard Business Review, in which he and his coauthors offer a "how to" guide on applying machine learning to help solve social problems.