Law and Technology Workshops: Machine Learning (Part 1)

Topics:
1. Case study: AI in Predicting Redivicism
2. Assumptions, assumptions, assumptions
3. Amazon Automated Hiring
4. Algorithmic Bias
5. Statistical Learning
6. Minima
Part 1: January 20, 2025 (Monday)
Time: 12:30pm - 2pm
Venue: Room 824, 8/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong
Speaker: Yong-Sheng Soh (Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics, National University of Singapore)
Artificial intelligence has found many applications in law. From predictions of recidivism risk to questions of statutory interpretation, humans now have the opportunity to consult machines when making important legal determinations. Many of these machines are able to teach themselves patterns from data, a process known as machine learning.
In these workshops, we will explore some prominent machine learning models from a mathematical perspective. The purpose of this exercise is to have a principled understanding of how these models work. Some questions we will try to explore include: What is the basic intuition on which these machine learning models are built on? What sort of structure in data does the success of these models rely on? How do we reason about correctness in a prediction? When we apply these models, what assumptions on the data do we implicitly make?
Yong-Sheng Soh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Prior to joining NUS, Yong Sheng was a Research Scientist at the Institute of High Performance Computing, Singapore. He received his Ph.D. in Applied and Computational Mathematics from Caltech (2018) and his B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge (2011). He was awarded the W.P. Carey & Co. Prize for the best doctoral thesis in Applied Mathematics, the Ben P.C. Chou Prize for the best doctoral thesis in Information Science and Technology, and the 2018 INFORMS Optimization Society Student Paper Prize. His research interests are in mathematical optimization with a focus on applications in the data sciences.
Moderator: Benjamin Chen, Associate Professor & Director of Law and Technology Centre, The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law