Exercises: Digital Divide, Computing Bias, and Crowdsourcing

Define the digital divide. Give one example of a group of people who might be on the "wrong side" of it, and name one way it affects them.

Which of these is an example of algorithmic bias? Explain your choice.

1. i) A calculator app that rounds results to two decimal places.

ii) A face-recognition system trained mostly on photos of light-skinned people that makes more errors on people with darker skin.

iii) A weather app that updates every hour.

Define crowdsourcing. Which of these are examples of crowdsourcing? Explain each choice.

1. i) Thousands of volunteers edit articles on an online encyclopedia.

ii) A city app lets residents report potholes.

iii) A company's engineers privately write the code for a new app.

A (hypothetical) survey of home broadband access in one state found:

1. a) Which areas show the biggest gap compared with the suburbs, and how large is it?

1. b) Describe two ways this gap could affect students' homework.

1. c) Suggest two actions that a school district or city could take to reduce the divide.

A company builds a program to screen job applications. It is trained on resumes of employees hired over the past 20 years, and most of those employees were men. The program never receives an applicant's gender as an input.

1. a) Explain how the program can still produce biased results.

1. b) Identify the source of the bias (data, design, or use) and give one example of a feature that could act as a stand-in for gender.

1. c) Describe two ways the company could reduce the bias.

A telehealth app lets patients in rural Montana video chat with doctors who are hundreds of miles away.

1. a) Describe two beneficial effects.

1. b) Describe two possible harmful or unintended effects.

1. c) Explain why a single innovation can have both beneficial and harmful effects at the same time.

A city plans to use a predictive program to decide where to send extra police patrols. It is trained on past arrest records. The (hypothetical) data show:

1. a) Explain how the program could send even more patrols to Neighborhood A. Describe the feedback loop.

1. b) Does the higher number of arrests in A prove that more crime happens there? Explain.

1. c) Make two recommendations to the city to reduce the harm, and argue for or against using the program at all.

A city launches a smartphone app where residents report broken streetlights, and the city fixes streetlights in the order of the number of reports. The (hypothetical) data after one month:

1. a) Does the number of reports accurately reflect where streetlights are broken? Explain using the digital divide.

1. b) Name one benefit of crowdsourcing in this case and one weakness.

1. c) Redesign the reporting system so that it is fairer, and explain how each change helps.