The Turing's Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas in London
Thursday 06 Jul 2023
Time: 19:00 - 21:30
Bio
Fascinated by the potential for code and AI to reform how law and justice function, Cari Hyde-Vaamonde is an experienced lawyer and court advocate. Having practised in diverse fields including technology, Cari became increasingly interested in systematic analysis. Her focus on research in the field recently culminated in a UKRI 4-year award to research the impacts of AI in justice settings at King's College London, where she is also a Visiting Lecturer. She is engaged in several interdisciplinary collaborations and presented research at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law in 2021.
Research interests
The legal system is on the brink of a crisis of confidence. Pressure on courts is unprecedented, and delays mean that justice is too often not being served. Tools exist that may assist in improving processes, and the legal framework to allow these methods is being put in place, but public trust in human-computer interaction in this context is under-explored. Arguments regarding bias, or technical metrics of accuracy only go so far. The legitimacy of the system is at risk of being undermined if reforms take place without public confidence being maintained.
To close this gap, the research develops a methodology for empirically testing the effect of algorithms on the legitimacy of the justice system of England and Wales, focusing on two scenarios: the single justice procedure (criminal jurisdiction) and the Affordability Calculator (civil jurisdiction). Incorporating methods from the social sciences to build mathematically-based models in a collaborative way, it focuses on perceptions of legitimacy, acknowledging that there are serious questions regarding the legitimacy of human-only judicial decision-making that this analysis cannot ignore.