NeurIPS 2019 Events

The 3rd QinAI Workshop/Poster Session is co-located with NeurIPS in Vancouver, Canada on Monday, Dec 9th, 2019. People of all identities are invited to attend!

Workshop

Date: Dec 9th, 2019

Time: 2pm to 5:00pm

Location: East Meeting Level Room 8+15

Date: Wednesday, December 11, 2019

Time: 7pm - 11pm

Location: TAPshack Coal Harbour, 1199 W Cordova St, Vancouver, BC V6E 4R5, Canada

Date: Tuesday Dec. 10 and Thursday Dec. 12

Time: 10-11am

Location: The Drop Coffee, Canada Place, Vancouver, BC

The first part of the Thursday hour will focus on volunteering for Queer in AI.

2:00 - 2:10 Introduction / Opening Remarks - Organizers

2:10 - 2:30 Transformer-Based Unsupervised Machine Translation Study from Gender-less Languages - G. Meltem Atay

2:30 - 2:50 The Values of Machine Learning - Ria Kalluri

2:50 - 3:20 [NEW TIME] Break/Speed Mentoring Session

3:20 - 4:20 [NEW TIME] Panel - Algorithmic Inequity: Impacts on the Queer Community and Beyond

4:20 - 4:40 Deconstructing Gender Prediction in NLP - Chandler May

4:40 - 5:00 Lost at the Margins: A Quantitative Analysis of Implicit Assumptions in Modeling Identity - Dylan Baker/Phoenix Meadowlark

5:00 Concluding Remarks - Organizers

The quickly advancing field of machine learning is exciting but raises complex ethical and social questions. How can we best use AI for varying applications while avoiding discrimination and lack of sensitivity to its users? Particularly, queer users of machine learning systems can fall victim to these often discriminatory, biased, and insensitive algorithms. In addition, there is a fundamental tension between the queer community, which defies categorization and reduction, and the current ubiquitous use of machine learning to categorize and reduce people. We want to raise awareness of these issues among the research community. But in order to do so, we need to make sure that the queer community is comfortable among their peers both in the lab and at conferences.

Our data shows that ⅔ of the queer attendees at NeurIPs are not publically out. The queer attendees rated their comfort level at the conference as a 3.3 on a scale of 1-5 from feeling dangerously hostile to completely welcome. We want to improve these numbers and make queer researchers feel that they can bring their whole selves to these conferences. According to our survey, our community's top two priorities are to build the queer AI community and increase the participation and visibility of queer people in machine learning. We have been working with conference organizers and the queer community to move towards these goals.

We believe the first step for creating more diverse and inclusive algorithms is talking about the problems and increasing the visibility of queer people in the machine learning community. By bringing together both queer people and allies, we can start conversations around biases in data and how these algorithms can have a negative impact on the queer community.

Extended abstract submission: Sep 16th, 2019

Acceptance notification: Oct 7th, 2019

Accepted authors register to NeurIPS by: Oct 14th, 2019

Workshop & Poster Session: Monday, Dec 9th, 2019

In the submission form, we collect name, email, institution, and wether you identify as LGBTQIA+. These are saved to a private section of Queer in AI organizers’ file repository, which only a handful of organizers have access to. We will also not publicize any identifiable information anywhere, including on our website. Abstracts will also not be published in NeurIPS or Queer in AI proceedings. All information we collect will be deleted from our google drive after the workshop.

If you are selected to present and requested a registration to the conference, we will have to input your name, email and institution in the NeurIPS website. We will not disclose whether you identify as LGBTQIA+. Similarly, if you requested and are selected for a travel grant, we will also input your information on the NeurIPS website in the travel grants section.

NeurIPS will not publicize this information anywhere, or share it with third parties in a way that can connect you with Queer in AI. They have also agreed to delete this information as soon as the conference is over.

One thing to note: when presenting your poster, you will be in a room designated for the Queer in AI poster session, standing next to your poster. Further, attending NeurIPS requires signing a photo release form, so you would have to be careful to ask folks with cameras (e.g.: taking pictures of your poster) to not include you/your name. We will also provide "No Photo" and "Photos OK" stickers and ask everyone to respect them.