Digital Humanities Seed Grant Project
Project Title: Holding Hiring Algorithms Accountable and Creating New Tools for Humanistic Research
Principal Investigators: Hilke Schellmann, Assistant Professor, NYU Journalism; Mona Sloane, Adjunct Professor, Tandon School of Engineering
Abstract: The “Holding Hiring Algorithms Accountable and Creating New Tools for Humanistic Research” project is led by Prof. Hilke Schellmann (Journalism) and Dr. Mona Sloane (Tandon). It focuses on artificial intelligence (AI) and hiring. Thanks to AI, hiring is undergoing a quiet, yet earth-shaking revolution. Many Fortune 500 companies employ AI-based solutions to weed through the millions of job applications the companies receive every year. The problem: many companies don’t want to reveal what technology they are using and vendors don’t want to reveal what’s in the black box, despite evidence that some automated decision making systems make biased and/or arbitrary decisions. This project combines methods of investigative journalism, sociology, and data science to develop a new socio-technical tool for critically investigating and auditing AI systems used in hiring.