Speaker Name: Bikalpa Neupane, Ph.D.
Dr. Bikalpa Neupane is the Director of AI Companion Program at Takeda, a multinational Pharmaceuticals where he is responsible to identify, manage, integrate and test end-to-end conversational AI and NLP components within the core Enterprise Digital Unit including robotic process automation use cases. Previously, Dr. Neupane led Natural Language Understanding product groups at IBM Watson where his team worked on natural language processing models as well as HITL (human-in-the-loop) approaches and pattern induction. Prior to IBM, Dr. Neupane worked in software engineering capacities at Microsoft and Overstock. Dr. Neupane holds a PhD in Informatics from the Penn State - main campus and undergraduate degrees from Brigham Young University, Utah. He was a visiting fellow with the CHILI lab at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, and an Australian Endeavor Fellowship recipient with the Connected Intelligence Center at the University of Technology, Sydney. He is a recipient of 'Technology for Social Impact fellowship' at Cornell University, 'United Nations Young Leader fellowship 2017', and 'Graduate Student Service Award - 2019', at Penn State. Dr Neupane's dissertation explored the issues of AI justice and equity among underprivileged and marginalized communities. Dr. Neupane serves as a consultant to organizations interested in developing and deploying data science and machine learning solutions at scale. He's published articles and journals in several artificial intelligence and human computer interaction outlets.
This talk is intended to the undergraduates, graduate students and faculty particularly interested in high level applications of HCI and AI in large scale industry systems. Dr Neupane's talk will touch on several areas of human -computer interaction and artificial intelligence, specifically:
(1) AI inequity in Hiring
Talent acquisition practices have a long tradition of explicit and implicit biases, which leads to discriminatory consequences. As AI technology is increasingly embedded in contemporary corporate environments, human and software actors interact to form algorithmic recruiting practices for completing activities such as job advertising,
resume preparation and submission, resume filtering and evaluation, candidate selection and tracking, interviewing, and hiring. However, while the software has become more intelligent and exhibits greater agency, the predictive and decision-making processes used by machine learning algorithms are often opaque – it is difficult to
explain why a particular decision was made. What is novel is that the discriminatory effects are data-driven. In addition to the traditional data sources of employment data, companies are including candidates’ performance on computer programming tasks as well as audio, video, text, social, and facial recognition data to construct
psychological profiles. When algorithms use these profiles as a proxy for measuring organizational fit and predicting the ability of an individual to perform the job, people from significantly different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds may be systemically disadvantaged. This talk provides overview of experience of job seekers as examples to demonstrate how AI systems may perpetuate or inhibit bias and discrimination if algorithmic methods for detecting and classifying human beings are built without considering the broader historical and social context.
(2) Human Computer Interaction in the Context of Global South
The second half of the talk will focus on Dr Neupane's personal experience of growing up in Nepal and sharing some of his inspiration that led to the foundation of Nepal's first human computer interaction institute. Human Computer Interaction Institute of Nepal was formed as a not-for-profit research organization that aims to use interdisciplinary approaches from HCI (Human Computer Interaction) and ICT (Information Communication and Technologies) in the context of developmental activities to study the underserved and under-resourced populations in Asia. In this talk he will share about his mission, vision, and some of the work he's done with the volunteers in Nepal in conjunction with his collaboration with Black in AI group - data browser.