Equifax Broadens Academic Partnership Program with new AI Ethics Lab at Kennesaw State University
As a part of the company’s longtime academic partnership efforts, Equifax recently launched a new AI Ethics lab at Georgia’s Kennesaw State University (KSU). The lab, the second with KSU and third for Equifax, will focus on studying the use of AI in the U.S. financial services industry.
Leading the efforts for Equifax will be Christopher Yasko, Chief Data Scientist and Dr. Joseph White, Distinguished Data Scientist. They will work with MinJae Woo, Assistant Professor of Statistics and Data Science at KSU. Woo, who will serve as director of the lab, will work with two doctoral students to establish methods that will help to identify how an AI-powered process may create different outcomes than traditional models and the potential impact of these differences. The Lab will have four different components of research that can each be explored over time: Privacy, Robustness, Explainability and Fairness.
“Expanding our academic partnership program enables us to increase our commitment to study the impacts of the technology we are building,” said Yasko. “We have seen great success from our previous labs and working with academic partners enables us to give back while growing the field while tapping into the next generation of data scientists.”
The lab is the second collaboration between the University and Equifax. In 2017, Kennesaw State’s Equifax Data Science Research Lab was launched with a mission to investigate business challenges and opportunities created by non-traditional sources of consumer and commercial data, and has resulted in two U.S. patent filings. The lab also explored ways to implement AI in credit risk scenarios in such a way that it was fully transparent and explainable to support efforts to gain approval from regulators.
As one of the first patent holders for explainable AI in credit risk modeling, Equifax has a deep legacy advancing data, analytics and technology to ensure fairness and transparency. Explainable AI (XAI) is our standard approach to Fair Lending and is a patent portfolio centered around specific machine learning models that generate logical and actionable reason codes to the consumer, increasing transparency in the process.
Equifax began its Academic partnership program in 2016 with Georgia Tech in Atlanta to develop ideas for graduate research and co-innovation and expanded to work with KSU in 2017.
The program enables Equifax to partner with academia in several ways including collaborative industry research, student-led research and community data labs. For more on the program and some of the student-led research, read this newsroom article from 2022.