Bias and Fairness

Lecture

This week's lecture covers the concepts of Bias and Fairness.

Slides: 

Transcript: 

Reading

Required - Fairness Measures

"The (Im)possibility of Fairness: Different Value Systems Require Different Mechanisms For Fair Decision Making"

https://dl-acm-org.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/doi/10.1145/3433949

(old link: https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2021/4/251365-the-impossibility-of-fairness/)

This short (but quite concept-dense) article contrasts different measures of fairness, and what assumptions they are making about the problems they're applied to.

Optional - Is Bias even the right problem?

"The Seductive Diversion of ‘Solving’ Bias in Artificial Intelligence"

https://onezero.medium.com/the-seductive-diversion-of-solving-bias-in-artificial-intelligence-890df5e5ef53

This article argues that focusing on bias as a core problem of AI actually allows other, worse, problems to be missed.

Optional - Practical Example in Diversity

"Diversity and Inclusion Metrics in Subset Selection"

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3375627.3375832

This paper gives an example of a more grounded practical example of quantifying fairness measures.

Optional - Challenges in getting data for Fairness checks

""What We Can't Measure, We Can't Understand": Challenges to Demographic Data Procurement in the Pursuit of Fairness"

https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.02282

This paper talks about the difficulty of getting the nceessary data for performing fairness checks, when often this is at odds with unbiased data collection in the first place.

License
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