Matthew Kearney was drawn to MIT by the tradition of its cross-country crew. Growing up in Austin, Texas, he beloved spending time outdoor and enjoying soccer, however by highschool operating had turn out to be his main sport. While taking a look at schools, he needed to discover a place with each sturdy lecturers and a powerful crew group. After an official go to with the cross-country crew, he knew MIT was the place for him.
“It’s been truly a defining part of my MIT experience,” says Kearney. “I love how quirky and fun and weird in the best way everyone is, and that atmosphere of doing things a little bit differently. That’s what sold me beyond the obvious academic and research reasons.”
Now a senior, and a crew captain, Kearney has made probably the most of his athletic and educational experiences. He arrived at MIT anticipating to main in electrical engineering and pc science however fell in love with philosophy after taking 24.02 (Moral Problems and the Good Life). He’s majoring in each whereas additionally finishing a grasp’s diploma in pc science and engineering.
“The part of philosophy that interests me is thinking about how we want to live our lives as people, what matters to us, what’s valuable to us, and how can we do it in a way that respects the values that matter to other people,” says Kearney. “I’ve really enjoyed more abstract but purposeful thinking to complement the technical rigor that’s gone on with my computer science major.”
Kearney’s pursuits intersect within the area of synthetic intelligence ethics, the place he hopes to leverage his interdisciplinary training to thoughtfully study and design synthetic intelligence methods. Following commencement, he’ll pursue a DPhil in pc science at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar.
“There’s not a lot of dialogue that goes from the abstract tenets of moral philosophy all the way to the practical building of an AI tool to solve a problem,” says Kearney. “In my DPhil, I want to ask how we can start off with the goal of building certain ethical principles into AI, and how can we bring that down layers of abstraction until we understand what technical tools we can build to help realize those goals.”
Outside of the classroom, Kearney has been excelling as properly. The cross-country crew captured a national title within the fall — not solely the primary in program historical past but additionally the primary NCAA crew championship by an MIT athletic crew — with Kearney additionally choosing up particular person All-American honors.
Human-centered AI design
Kearney is at the moment engaged on two analysis efforts. The first is a challenge with the Human Systems Lab, the place he’s designing downscaling strategies to use to local weather knowledge. Most fashions are on a world scale, however having the ability to predict how native areas will likely be affected may assist information efficient coverage and supply perception to folks dwelling within the area.
For his grasp’s thesis, Kearney helps to develop a deeper understanding of huge language fashions, that are used to construct instruments resembling ChatGPT. Beyond gaining the technical information, Kearney can also be all the time excited about the moral ramifications of those instruments.
“Under the hood, people aren’t entirely sure why these models make certain decisions,” says Kearney. “They understand mathematically how it works, but they don’t know why models make individual decisions. The focus of my research has been trying to understand where concepts are located in the networks, and how are they recognized and transformed throughout the network. Then we can start to understand both the fairness and ethical questions about the model.”
At a excessive stage, Kearney is all in favour of choosing aside these fashions to grasp them from all angles. He acknowledges the immense potential synthetic intelligence has to affect many alternative fields, however he additionally acknowledges the necessity to wield know-how thoughtfully. This perception was sparked by the category 6.882 (Ethical Machine Learning in Human Deployments), a particular topic supplied by Assistant Professor Marzyeh Ghassemi in spring 2022.
“My technical education taught me that any problem can be solved if we throw enough engineering and technology at it,” says Kearney, including that he believes he and plenty of others have blind spots of their technical analysis. “This class really helped me exit that headspace to see that these problems can only be solved through social-centered, or economic, or political approaches. We need to think about how we can use tools from other disciplines to be thoughtful about how we’re using those technologies.”
Kearney sees a chance for his work to make an affect in a spread of areas, from well being care to financial institution loans.
“In application areas where we know there is already bias built into the models systemically, they’re at risk of it carrying over into model decisions that are made,” says Kearney. “Nevertheless, these models are going to continue to be used and made, and it’s important that they’re made in the way that one, we can understand how they’re actually working, and two, we can guarantee fairer outcomes.”
Kearney finds pc science and philosophy to be in fixed dialogue with one another, and is impressed by the pioneers within the area of AI ethics to proceed constructing deliberate methods that make a constructive affect on the world.
As he wraps up his time at MIT, Kearney can also be trying ahead to closing out his last monitor seasons sturdy, following the success of the cross-country crew.
“This fall was the closest and most tight-knit the team’s ever been,” says Kearney. “We have such incredible talent in coaching this year, and already so many more national qualifiers than we’ve ever had. I’m excited to see what happens with it and to go out with a bang.”