...Featuring Dr. Cristopher Moore of the Santa Fe Institute,
University of Iowa Ida Cordelia Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor
FREE Public Lecture - Everyone Invited!
Topic Summary
Artificial intelligence is playing an increasing role at every stage of the justice system. Cameras and facial recognition help identify suspects; risk assessments advise judges whether defendants can be safely released while awaiting trial; forensic evidence from DNA analysis software is used in the courtroom; and more risk assessments make recommendations about sentences and parole.
While these systems may be helpful to the police, to judges, and to juries, many of them are proprietary and opaque, and have never been independently tested for accuracy and fairness. Criminal justice involves fundamental constitutional rights: to confront your accuser, cross-examine witnesses, and contest evidence brought against you. These rights create tension with AI tools, even more than in other high-stakes domains like health, finance, and housing.
How do these concepts of procedural justice survive in a world of machine-generated evidence? What kinds of transparency do AI systems need to have to preserve constitutional rights, and to facilitate a democratic discussion of when, how, and if they should be used?
Speaker Background
Professor Cristopher Moore is an internationally recognized computer scientist and physicist whose work spans computer science, mathematics, physics, and the liberal arts. A senior faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute, he has produced foundational research on computation, complex systems, networks, statistical inference, and algorithmic decision-making. He is co-author of The Nature of Computation, published by Oxford University Press, a widely cited volume that synthesizes ideas from theoretical computer science, physics, and mathematics. Professor Moore’s research appears in leading journals and conferences in computer science, physics, and applied mathematics, and has influenced understanding of computational complexity, phase transitions in inference problems, and network structure.
Professor Moore has been elected a Fellow of multiple scholarly societies, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Mathematical Society (AMS), the American Physical Society (APS), and the Network Science Society. Deeply committed to public scholarship, Professor Moore engages with questions that reach beyond technical fields: the societal implications of algorithms, fairness and transparency in data-driven decision-making, and the limits of computation for understanding natural and social systems.
Cristopher Moore received his B.A. in Physics, Mathematics, and Integrated Science from Northwestern University, and his Ph.D. in Physics from Cornell. From 2000 to 2012 he was a professor at the University of New Mexico, with joint appointments in Computer Science and Physics. Since 2012, Moore has been a resident professor at the Santa Fe Institute; he has also held visiting positions at École Normale Superieure, École Polytechnique, Université Paris 7, École Normale Superieure de Lyon, Northeastern University, the University of Michigan, and Microsoft Research. He has written 160 papers at the boundary between mathematics, physics, and computer science, ranging from quantum computing, social networks, and phase transitions in NP-complete problems and Bayesian inference, to risk assessment in criminal justice.
------------------------------
Additional Events Featuring Dr. Cristopher Moore at UIowa:
CS Colloquium: "Easy, Hard, and Impossible: Phase Transitions in Computation", Friday, 9/11, 3:30 - 5:00pm, SH 140