Bridging the gap between academia and industry


Nov 30, 2022

An enthusiastic researcher, a senior scientist at Zalando, and an “algorithmic justice consultant”. Meike Zehlike can wear multiple hats and apply her multidisciplinary skills to academia and industry. During her four-month visit to the Complexity Science Hub Vienna (CSH), Zehlike will be working with Fariba Karimi and her team to investigate ethical values and their possible effects on network structures.

 

What are your plans during your stay at CSH?

 

The plan is to combine my knowledge of ethical artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithmic fairness with CSH’s knowledge of network inequality and try to come up with an understanding of what it needs for networks to have certain definitions of fairness. At the moment, we’re analyzing different effects in network structures and seeing whether we can associate these different effects with different ethical values. At first, we’ll do the analysis, and later we want to run experiments.

 

You’ve got a foot in academia and a foot in the private sector.

Scientists still rarely do this. How did this happen?

 

This is the first time in my life – and I have never thought I would ever say that about a job – that I am in love with working with ethical reasoning in AI. I love it with all my heart! Because I believed there would be no other jobs for me [outside of universities or research institutes], I believed I had to be in academia to work in this field.

 

Then, after I finished my PhD, a job at [the German online fashion giant] Zalando opened up. This is a research position in algorithmic fairness, and an entire team is dedicated to it. At first, I wasn’t sure. However, I became more and more fond of it during the interview process. It turns out to be a really nice job. It’s a different way of working [compared to academia], and the field of ethical AI is younger in industry than it is in academia, and there are still a lot of unanswered questions.

 

From your private sector experience, what lessons have you learned?

 

I learned that if you want more women in academia, you need to change the structure. The way academia works is extremely discriminating against women for different reasons. One of the reasons is what Fariba has showed [in her recent study].

 

And that is something that the private sector is actually doing better. My experience is that big tech companies, as compared to the “old industries”, are much better at understanding how to have a more diverse workforce. Talent dropout is a crucial point [for academia]: focusing only on 50 percent of the population will result in a large amount of talent being lost to industry.

 

In addition, I was surprised to observe – at least at Zalando – the high level of happiness in comparison with academia, where publish or perish is the dogma. It goes without saying that [in industry] you have to deliver and receive performance evaluations. Also, industry seems to be more flexible regarding career paths and supports industry-academia exchange.

 

Could this be a new model for innovation (the exchange between

academia and the private, public and non-governmental sectors)?

 

Totally.

 

Journalists, NGOs, academics have asked lots of questions about ethical AI, and it has taken a while for the industry to say “Okay, we need to address this problem.” This is a very positive development.

 

I won’t be able to apply what I’ll learn at CSH to Zalando now since Zalando is not a social network. However, it might be a potential feature for them in the future. Industry can benefit from understanding the current debate in academia and the questions being addressed. Additionally, I believe that researchers who work in industry also enjoy some academic freedom, since they don’t worry about publishing their work.

 

Could industry offer academic freedom as well?

 

Yes, in the sense that you don’t need to worry about your job. However, you do not have academic freedom in the sense of choosing whatever topic you want to work on. Business needs will still exist. You’ll likely be very business-driven depending on your type of company.

 

In this field, which is so young, it’s crucial that researchers can move between academia and industry. Furthermore, interdisciplinary research is the future: more and more we want to solve real world problems collaboratively. We see this in ethical AI: if you come up with efficiency optimizing algorithms and put them out there to society without consulting social scientists, something terrible may result. This is something we don’t want.

 

This approach to interdisciplinarity should be embraced more in a variety of ways, including from the perspective of industry and academia.

 

 

You describe yourself as an “Algorithmic Justice Consultant.”

What does it mean?

 

As a consultant, I provide ethical guidance on algorithms. One example is my work with IG Metal [the metalworkers’ union in Germany, which is the largest industrial union in Europe]. It’s mostly about raising awareness with works councils, and educating them about what’s happening in ethical AI, and what the problems are with AI systems, particularly when it comes to people analytics.

 

People analytics are being pushed more and more in companies, with the goal of improving (and reducing discrimination, for example) and becoming more efficient (in hiring process). Many of the tools being proposed at the moment make very questionable assumptions about what a good candidate should look like. To educate works councils about that situation, I show examples of what doesn’t work well and why.


Press

Kritik an EU-Chatkontrolle


Ö1 | Digital.leben, May 11, 2023

News

May 25, 2023

Quotas alone will not solve the problem

Press

Stablecoin Destabilization - why should we care?


Forbes, Apr 27, 2023

Press

Treibjagd im Darknet: Neue Technologien für Cyber-Ermittler


Salzburger Nachrichten, May 16, 2023

Publication

V.D.P. Servedio, M. R. Ferreira, N. Reisz, R. Costas, S. Thurner

Scale-free growth in regional scientific capacity building explains long-term scientific dominance

Chaos, Solitons & Fractals 167 (2023) 113020

Event

CSH Talk by Thomas Choi "Supply Networks: Dyads, Triads, Tetrads, and Beyond"


Jun 06, 2023 | 15:0016:00

Complexity Science Hub Vienna

People

May 30, 2023

Meet Sachin Rawat

Publication

A. Nerpel, et al.

SARS-ANI: a global open access dataset of reported SARS-CoV-2 events in animals

Scientific Data 9 (438) (2022)

Research News

May 30, 2023

Obesity increases risk of mental disorders throughout life

Publication

C. Deischinger, E. Dervic, S. Nopp, M. Kaleta, P. Klimek, A. Kautzky-Willer

Diabetes mellitus is associated with a higher relative risk for venous thromboembolism in females than in males

Diabetes Res Clin Pract. (2022) 36471550

Event

CSH Vernissage: Wolfgang Zeindl


Jun 01, 2023 | 18:0021:00

Event

CSH Talk by Guy Arie Amichay "Modeling Firefly Swarms as Coupled Oscillators"


Jun 02, 2023 | 15:0016:00

Complexity Science Hub Vienna

People

May 30, 2023

Meet Sachin Rawat

Research News

May 30, 2023

Obesity increases risk of mental disorders throughout life

News

May 25, 2023

Quotas alone will not solve the problem

Spotlight

May 17, 2023

Complexity Research for Digital Humanism

People

May 12, 2023

Peter Turchin introduces his new book

Research News

May 2, 2023

Scientists create high-resolution poverty maps using big data

News

Apr 26, 2023

BEYOND COLLECTIVE STUPIDITY

Spotlight

Apr 21, 2023

How does a region become a center for innovation?

Spotlight

Apr 14, 2023

Are cars our kings?

Press

Kritik an EU-Chatkontrolle


Ö1 | Digital.leben, May 11, 2023

Press

Treibjagd im Darknet: Neue Technologien für Cyber-Ermittler


Salzburger Nachrichten, May 16, 2023

Press

„Die Älteren halten zu Erdogan, die jüngere Generation hat andere Sorgen“


Cicero, May 9, 2023

Press

Stablecoin Destabilization - why should we care?


Forbes, Apr 27, 2023

Press

„Wir sind nicht so einfach zu manipulieren“ [feat. Hannah Metzler]


Kurier, Apr 29, 2023

Press

Die manchmal fatale Lust, alles selbst zu recherchieren [feat. Mirta Galesic & Henrik Olsson]


Die Presse, Apr 14, 2023

Press

La scienza ha creato una nuova classificazione delle aperture degli scacchi [ital | feat. Vito Servedio & Giordano De Marzo]


WIRED, Apr 10, 2023

Press

Studie: Daten-Verknüpfung ermöglicht Ländern zielgerichtete Maßnahmen [feat. Peter Klimek]


Salzburger Nachrichten, Apr 12, 2023

Press

La contingencia y la movilidad eléctrica [span. | feat. Rafael Prieto-curiel]


Heraldo de México, Mar 28, 2023

Press

Ursachen für den Antibiotika-Mangel [feat. Peter Klimek]


ORF (ZIB 1), Mar 27, 2023

Publication

R. Prieto-Curiel, J. E. Patino, B. Anderson

Scaling of the morphology of African cities

PNAS 120 (9) (2023) e2214254120

Publication

A. Di Natale, D. Garcia

LEXpander: applying colexification networks to automated lexicon expansion

Behaviour Research Methods (2023)

Publication

V.D.P. Servedio, M. R. Ferreira, N. Reisz, R. Costas, S. Thurner

Scale-free growth in regional scientific capacity building explains long-term scientific dominance

Chaos, Solitons & Fractals 167 (2023) 113020

Publication

C. Deischinger, E. Dervic, S. Nopp, M. Kaleta, P. Klimek, A. Kautzky-Willer

Diabetes mellitus is associated with a higher relative risk for venous thromboembolism in females than in males

Diabetes Res Clin Pract. (2022) 36471550

Publication

A. Nerpel, et al.

SARS-ANI: a global open access dataset of reported SARS-CoV-2 events in animals

Scientific Data 9 (438) (2022)

Publication

E. D. Lee, X. Chen, B. C. Daniels

Discovering sparse control strategies in neural activity

PLoS Computational Biology (May 27) (2022)

Publication

H. Kong, S. Martin-Gutierrez, F. Karimi

Influence of the first-mover advantage on the gender disparities in physics citations

Communications Physics 5 (243) (2022)

Publication

T.M. Pham, J. Korbel, R. Hanel, S. Thurner

Empirical social triad statistics can be explained with dyadic homophylic interactions

PNAS 119 (2022) e2121103119

Publication

G. De Marzo, V.D.P. Servedio

Quantifying the complexity and similarity of chess openings using online chess community data

Scientific Reports 13 (2023) 5327

Publication

D. R. Lo Sardo, S. Thurner, et al.

Systematic population-wide ecological analysis of regional variability in disease prevalence

Heliyon 9(4) (2023) e15377

Publication

J. Wachs

Digital traces of brain drain: developers during the Russian invasion of Ukraine

EPJ Data Science 12 (2023) 14

Publication

D. Diodato, R. Hausmann, F. Neffke

The impact of return migration on employment and wages in Mexican cities

Journal of Urban Economics 135 (2023) 103557

Event

CSH Talk by Thomas Choi "Supply Networks: Dyads, Triads, Tetrads, and Beyond"


Jun 06, 2023 | 15:0016:00

Complexity Science Hub Vienna

Event

CSH Workshop: "Firm-level supply network data for policy making"


Jun 05, 2023 | 8:00Jun 06, 2023 | 17:00

Complexity Science Hub Vienna

Event

CSH Talk by Guy Arie Amichay "Modeling Firefly Swarms as Coupled Oscillators"


Jun 02, 2023 | 15:0016:00

Complexity Science Hub Vienna

Event

CSH Vernissage: Wolfgang Zeindl


Jun 01, 2023 | 18:0021:00

Event

CSH Talk by François Lafond "Firm-level production networks: what do we (really) know?"


Jun 07, 2023 | 15:0016:00

Complexity Science Hub Vienna

Event

CSH Talk by Andreas Moxnes: "Growing Together and Apart: Scale Economies and Specialization"


May 31, 2023 | 15:0016:00

Complexity Science Hub Vienna