Quantitative and Qualitative AI Ethics Lab (QQAEL)

Dr. Phillip Honenberger
Director
Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies
jaywilliam.honenberger@morgan.edu 

Welcome to the Quantitative and Qualitative AI Ethics Lab (QQAEL – pronounced “quale”) at Morgan State University! We’re a team of researchers from diverse backgrounds including philosophy, computer science, mathematics, and social science. We leverage our diverse skill sets to tackle complex ethical problems in AI development, evaluation, and deployment.

A major focus of the lab is on quantitative metrics for ethical values such as fairness, transparency, and individual and collective agency, including questions of the scope and limits of specific metrics and of quantitative metrics in general. Current projects in the lab include critical and constructive work on resolving conflicts between incompatible fairness metrics (“fairness impossibility”); disentangling different concepts and contexts of bias and providing guidance on when biases are ethically acceptable or unacceptable; and exploring how and why “proxies” can, in general, align or fail to align with the values they’re used to measure.

Publications:
(1) G. Waters, M. Mapp, and P. Honenberger, "Decisional Value Scores: A New Family of Metrics for Ethical AI-ML" (2024), AI & Ethics, https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-024-00504-8

(2) P. Honenberger, "Fairness Impossibility in AI-ML Systems: An Integrated Ethics Approach" (2024), in Mueller, V.C., A.R.Dewey, L. Dung, and G. Loehr (eds.), Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence: The State of the Art, Synthese Library, Berlin: SpringerNature (forthcoming).

(3) P. Honenberger, O. Ola, W. Mapp, & P. Lee, "Effects of Matching on Evaluations of Accuracy, Fairness, and Fairness Impossibility in AI-ML Systems" (2024), The International FLAIRS Conference Proceedings, 37 (1). https://doi.org/10.32473/flairs.37.1.135585