The Week Ahead: Calculating AI’s Impact on the Housing Industry

On Wednesday, January 31 at 9:00 a.m. Central, the Senate Banking Committee will present the live hearing, "Artificial Intelligence and Housing: Exploring Promise and Peril."

The growth and evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) comes despite some potential serious and dangerous scenarios. AI is only as good as the data it has been given, and this information can be incorrect, biased, or skewed. For example, do AI programs know if the information it receives was plagiarized? Is the data skewed toward a certain minority? How does AI analyze credit data?

These and several other issues will be discussed by a panel of experts as AI continues to evolve and be increasingly utilized by the nation’s housing providers. Topics such as appraisal bias will be highlighted by a panel of witnesses, including Lisa Rice, President and CEO of the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA); Dr. Vanessa Perry, Interim Dean and Professor, George Washington University School of Business, and Non-Resident Fellow, Housing Finance Policy Center, Urban Institute; and Nicholas Schmidt, Partner and Artificial Intelligence Practice Leader, BLDS, and Founder and CTO of SolasAI.

As President and CEO of the NFHA, Rice promotes efforts to advance fair housing principles, preserve and broaden fair housing protections, and expand equal housing opportunities for millions of Americans. NFHA is the trade association for more than 170 fair housing and justice-centered organizations and individuals throughout the U.S. and its territories, and is the nation’s only national civil rights agency solely dedicated to eliminating all forms of housing discrimination.

Rice is a published author contributing to several books and journals addressing a range of fair housing issues, including The Fight for Fair Housing: Causes, Consequences, and Future Implications of the 1968 Federal Fair Housing Act; Designed for the Future: 80 Practical Ideas for a Sustainable World; Discriminatory Effects of Credit Scoring on Communities of Color; and From Foreclosure to Fair Lending: Advocacy, Organizing, Occupancy, and the Pursuit of Equitable Credit.

Rice played a key role in crafting sections of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and in establishing the Office of Fair Lending within the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). She also helped lead the investigation and resolution of precedent-setting fair housing cases which have resulted in providing remedies for millions of people as well as the elimination of systemic discriminatory practices involving lending, insurance, rental, and zoning matters.

Dr. Perry is a Professor and Interim Vice Dean at the George Washington University School of Business. Her research is focused on consumers in housing and financial markets, marketplace discrimination, and public policy interventions, and she has been published extensively in scholarly and practitioner-oriented outlets. Dr. Perry previously served as a Senior Advisor to the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and as an expert at the CFPB. She also served for several years as a Senior Economist at Freddie Mac. In her capacity as President of the Rice Coleman Ross Group, she has been a consultant to numerous public and private sector clients. Perry has a BA from the American University, an MBA from Washington University in St. Louis, and a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Schmidt specializes in the application of statistics and economics to questions of law, regulatory compliance, and best practices in model governance. He has created AI-based techniques that enable clients to minimize disparate impact in credit, insurance, and marketing models. He writes and speaks frequently on the benefits and risks of AI, explainable AI, and how to make fairer machine learning algorithms.

Schmidt is currently a Partner and the AI Practice Leader at BLDS LLC, a Philadelphia-based consulting firm that provides expert guidance to companies and regulators in the application of economics and statistics to questions of law and regulation. In his consulting work, Nick focuses on algorithmic fairness, explainable AI and ensuring robust model governance practices. As Head of the AI practice, Nick develops and assists in the deployment of methods that allow his clients to make their AI models fairer and more inclusive. His consulting work led to the development of SolasAI, a compliance-focused and AI-based software platform that identifies and mitigates bias and discrimination in algorithmic decisioning. As its CEO, Nick has led SolasAI to create a product that allows customers to review, analyze, and make decisions related to disparity reduction in an efficient and transparent way. This innovative product illuminates and reduces causes of disparate impact, disparate treatment, and other forms of bias in algorithmic models, protecting customers against regulatory, legal, and reputational problems, while accelerating modelers’ ability to innovate.

Click here for more information or to register for the Senate Banking Committee hearing “Artificial Intelligence and Housing: Exploring Promise and Peril.”

Here's what else is happening in The Week Ahead:

• Sneak Peek of Velocity: a FORCE Conference Webinar (Tuesday)
• Fannie Mae's Refinance Application-Level Index (RALI) (Tuesday)
• MBA Weekly Applications Survey (Wednesday)
• Realtor.com Weekly Housing Market Recap (Wednesday)
• Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey (Thursday)
• U.S. Department of Labor's Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report (Thursday)