David Banks and Yen-Chun Liu examine the future of statistics in artificial intelligence for autonomous vehicles.

Ethical issues in statistical practice in the AI era require continuous attention, reflection, and dialogue among all parties involved. The ASA’s Ethical Guidelines for Statistical Practice and members of the ASA Committee on Professional Ethics are here to help.

David Corliss examines how shifting the focus to testing for and mitigating bias at the design stage instead of after code is released can help prevent many of the problems seen in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Scientists and statisticians address the reliability of radiology and pathology applications by using AI-based systems, but not without challenges.

Giri Gopalan, Natalie Klein, and Emily Casleton show how basic statistical thinking can contribute meaningfully to foundation models and AI and predict much more work ahead for statisticians in this arena.

Chris Barker shares the path his life has taken as a statistician, from his days in academia to his work in the pharmaceutical industry and his membership with the ASA.

Pamela McGovern grew up in Connecticut and majored in mathematics in college while working as an actuarial intern during the summer. Being an actuary seemed like a good fit for a math major, but the job also exposed her to statistics and she changed course. McGovern went on to earn a master’s degree at the University of Connecticut. Through the ASA, she learned about career opportunities in the federal government and decided to pursue a mathematical statistician position. After graduating, she began her career in the federal statistical system at the US Census Bureau. She currently works as a senior mathematical statistician at the US Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistics Service. Throughout her 27-year career as a federal statistician, her work has focused on survey statistics and methodology.

Leah Jager was born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her dad was a college mathematics professor and her mom taught middle-school math and English. From a young age, she liked playing school and hoped to someday be a professor like her dad. Jager’s first encounter with statistics occurred during a summer internship in a food lab within the R&D division at Amway Corporation. The goal of her project was to improve the taste of a beverage using varying concentrations of a flavor additive. She never succeeded in making the drink taste better, but she did become interested in statistics. Today, as a statistics and biostatistics professor at Johns Hopkins, she is inspired when she sees a student realize the relevance statistics has in their life.

Cathy O’Neil grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, and was always interested in both music and math. She entered finance in 2007, right before the credit crisis, and became alarmed by what she saw as the misuse of mathematics as an intimidating cover used to exploit less sophisticated investors. In 2011, she became a data scientist and joined Occupy Wall Street. It was there she saw how data science was being used to make lucky people luckier and unlucky people unluckier. The result was the book Weapons of Math Destruction and the formation of her algorithmic auditing company, ORCAA. The mission of ORCAA is to develop standards around algorithmic accountability in general and algorithmic fairness towards individuals in protected classes specifically.

As an undergraduate, Kathy Ensor was fascinated by probability, statistical graphics, statistical theory, and computers. At age 19, she wrote a Fortran program that could play chess and optimize the next move based on a simplistic probabilistic algorithm and data gleaned from the user of the program. She was thrilled to eventually land in a statistics career, though, as it captured all her interests. Hired at Rice University, she built the statistics department from the ground up and served as chair from 1999–2013. In 2021, she was elected president of the ASA and established the IDEA Forum to showcase how statisticians improve lives. While Ensor believes all these accomplishments are important, she says she derives her energy and continued commitment to the profession from the amazing community of statisticians and data scientists, her collaborators, doctoral alumni, and students whom she mentored throughout the years.