SESP senior Asha Buerk attended her first Responsible AI Student Organization discussion three years ago. Now, she said, recalling the experience still makes her smile. Even as one of only two freshmen in the room, she felt genuinely heard by students with years more experience.
“It made my month. It was such a welcoming committee, and it was so warm,” Buerk said.
Now the president of RAISO, Buerk said she intends to carry on the group’s mission of drawing awareness to AI’s social and ethical impacts. RAISO was founded in 2020 to fill a gap at Northwestern for students who wanted to talk about AI ethics.
Buerk said RAISO supports the growing awareness of the problem that algorithms, though often imperceptible in daily life, can reinforce inequalities.
“It’s very easy to build a system that falls prone to the biases that we’re so accustomed to in everyday life and, not only perpetuating, but exacerbating those biases,” Buerk said. “What happens when you put all of the applications for a job through an AI feeder to sort out the best applicants, and they routinely don’t choose women and people of color? That’s what our ethical consideration is focused on.”
Buerk initially joined RAISO because of her past work on linguistic polarization, the study of how subtle differences in word choice can influence algorithms, reinforcing social biases.
That work aligns with RAISO’s focus on responsible AI and its commitment to diversity in a field that doesn’t always reflect different perspectives, Buerk said.
“A lot of spaces in tech and tech policy are incredibly white and incredibly male, and I love that, (at) RAISO… we make a really concerted effort to work beyond those limitations that have been placed on tech as a sphere,” Buerk said.
Although it’s most directly connected to computer science, RAISO draws on a wide range of disciplines, including students of the social sciences, humanities and social policy alike.
Weinberg sophomore Healy Weisman said RAISO’s ethical and diversity efforts taught her that technology isn’t neutral, and even something as precise as a machine learning model can reflect the biases of the data it’s trained on.
Weisman works on the group’s sign language project. The goal of the project, which falls under RAISO’s Workshop Committee, is for the computer to recognize a letter being signed in a photo it is given, she said.
“In our sign language project, we talked about how a lot of AI models are better at recognizing pictures of white users just because their data sets are mostly made up of photos of people with lighter skin,” Weisman said. “So we talked about (the) ethical implications of that and how important it is to make our project accessible and as widely applicable as possible.”
Each of RAISO’s four committees focuses on a different aspect of the organization. The Education Committee hosts weekly conversations on AI ethics, the Workshop Committee provides hands-on practice with building models, the Events Committee connects students with outside experts and the Newsletter Committee offers a platform — Hold the Code — for writers to publish on issues in technology.
Weinberg sophomore Brandon Kopp, head of the Workshop Committee, supports students who are interested in AI and new to the club. Those students can attend Education Committee events to learn about the club and find a topic they’re interested in.
Kopp originally joined RAISO to build computer science projects and said the workshops are challenging but made to be accessible. He said his favorite moment came at the end of his first workshop, when he completed a small project from start to finish.
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