The child benefit scandal through computer scientists’ eyes

TU Delft | The Hague brings Dr. Cynthia C.S. Liem MMus (left) and Ilyaz Nasrullah Msc. (right) to talk about computer scientists' perspective on the applying of algorithm for the decision-making process.

ABOUT THIS WEBINAR

The Dutch child benefits scandal has been a major scandal in recent political history, receiving much publicity. In November 2021, the newspaper Trouw published a deep-dive on the biased algorithmic decision-making component of this scandal. This commentary was prepared in close collaboration with two TU Delft alumni: the two speakers in this webinar.

In this webinar, we will share why our professional expertise was needed to prepare this item. We will highlight how our different professional roles led to different perspectives on the problem, share the lessons we learned in making technical insights suitable for a general audience, and discuss why the self-reflection of computer scientists is needed in the public debate.

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OUR SPEAKER

Dr. Cynthia C. S. Liem MMus

Associate Professor, Multimedia Computing Group, Intelligent Systems, Delft University of Technology

Cynthia Liem is an Associate Professor in the Multimedia Computing Group of Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, and pianist of the Magma Duo. Her research interests focus on making people discover new interests and content which would not trivially be retrieved in music and multimedia collections, assessing questions of validation and validity in data science, and fostering trustworthy and responsible AI applications when human-interpreted data is involved.

She initiated and co-coordinated the European research projects PHENICX (2013-2016) and TROMPA (2018-2021). She gained industrial experience at Bell Labs Netherlands, Philips Research and Google. She was a recipient of the Lucent Global Science and Google Anita Borg Europe Memorial scholarships, the Google European Doctoral Fellowship 2010 in Multimedia, a finalist of the New Scientist Science Talent Award 2016 for young scientists committed to public outreach, Researcher-in-Residence 2018 at the National Library of The Netherlands, general chair of the ISMIR 2019 conference, and keynote speaker at the RecSys 2021 conference.

Presently, Cynthia Liem is a core team member (portfolio ‘digitalization’) of the TU Delft | The Hague team, co-leads the Future Libraries Lab with the National Library of The Netherlands, is track leader of the Trustworthy AI track in the AI for Fintech lab with the ING bank, holds a TU Delft Education Fellowship on Responsible AI teaching, and is a member of the Dutch Young Academy.

OUR SPEAKER

Ilyaz Nasrullah MSc.

Digital Strategist (independent) & Digital Technology Columnist at Trouw

Ilyaz Nasrullah is an independent digital strategist and the digital technology columnist of the Dutch newspaper Trouw. His professional interest is the positive and innovative use of digital technology and the long-term impact of digital technology on society.

His professional experience is diverse, having worked in technical, managerial and advisory roles for startups, enterprises, governments and universities such as Eneco, Royal IHC, the municipality of Rotterdam and the TU Delft.

Most recently, he was the co-founder and chairman of the Port & Maritime working group of the Dutch AI Coalition (2020-2021), and started writing a biweekly column on the societal impact of digital technology for the Dutch newspaper Trouw in 2021. He is set to join the advisory board of DEN in 2022, a foundation that supports the digital transformation of the Dutch cultural sector.