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Machine Learning Practices Outside Big Tech: How Resource Constraints Challenge Responsible Development

Published: 30 July 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Practitioners from diverse occupations and backgrounds are increasingly using machine learning (ML) methods. Nonetheless, studies on ML Practitioners typically draw populations from Big Tech and academia, as researchers have easier access to these communities. Through this selection bias, past research often excludes the broader, lesser-resourced ML community---for example, practitioners working at startups, at non-tech companies, and in the public sector. These practitioners share many of the same ML development difficulties and ethical conundrums as their Big Tech counterparts; however, their experiences are subject to additional under-studied challenges stemming from deploying ML with limited resources, increased existential risk, and absent access to in-house research teams. We contribute a qualitative analysis of 17 interviews with stakeholders from organizations which are less represented in prior studies. We uncover a number of tensions which are introduced or exacerbated by these organizations' resource constraints---tensions between privacy and ubiquity, resource management and performance optimization, and access and monopolization. Increased academic focus on these practitioners can facilitate a more holistic understanding of ML limitations, and so is useful for prescribing a research agenda to facilitate responsible ML development for all.

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  1. Machine Learning Practices Outside Big Tech: How Resource Constraints Challenge Responsible Development

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        AIES '21: Proceedings of the 2021 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society
        July 2021
        1077 pages
        ISBN:9781450384735
        DOI:10.1145/3461702
        This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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        Published: 30 July 2021

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        1. ML developers
        2. big tech
        3. contextual inquiry
        4. machine learning practice

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