Invited Talk #2 - Towards fairness & robustness in machine learning for dermatology

Recent years have seen an overwhelming body of work on fairness and robustness in Machine Learning (ML) models. This is not unexpected, as it is an increasingly important concern as ML models are used to support decision-making in high-stakes applications such as mortgage lending, hiring, and diagnosis in healthcare. Currently, most ML models assume ideal conditions and rely on the assumption that test/clinical data comes from the same distribution of the training samples. However, this assumption is not satisfied in most real-world applications; in a clinical setting, we can find different hardware devices, diverse patient populations, or samples from unknown medical conditions. On the other hand, we need to assess potential disparities in outcomes that can be translated and deepen in our ML solutions. In this presentation, we will discuss how to evaluate skin-tone representation in ML solutions for dermatology and how we can enhance the existing models’ robustness by detecting out-out-distribution test samples (e.g., new clinical protocols or unknown disease types) over off-the-shelf ML models.