Readings and Schedule

A pile of blue notebooks
unsplash-logoJohn-Mark Smith

This is a reading-intensive course. Before class (by noon), e-mail me a 3-sentence summary of the paper’s contributions and 1 thing you learned from reading it. Don’t spend long on this e-mail.

Background

Week 1 (Jan. 13–17)

Tuesday
No reading - intro to class topics
Class intro notes
Thursday

Batya Friedman and Helen Nissenbaum. 1996. Bias in Computer Systems. ACM Transactions on Information Systems 14, 3 (July 1996), 330–347. doi:10.1145/230538.230561.

Week 2 (Jan. 20–24)

Tuesday
Watch Cynthia Dwork’s KDD 2017 keynote (video is on Source Materials tab).
Thursday

Cynthia Dwork, Moritz Hardt, Toniann Pitassi, Omer Reingold, and Richard Zemel. 2012. Fairness Through Awareness. In Proceedings of the 3rd Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS ’12), 214–226. doi:10.1145/2090236.2090255.

Week 3 (Jan. 27–31)

No class meetings while I am at ACM FAT*.

Use the time you would spend in class to watch livestreams of FAT* sessions. Feel free to meet in the classroom to watch some together. I also recommend getting ahead on next week’s reading.

Week 4 (Feb. 3–7)

This week will have 3 topics divided across its 2 days:

  • Takeaways from FAT* (your livestream viewing and my attendance)

  • Discuss a paper by Barocas and Selbst:

    Solon Barocas and Andrew D. Selbst. 2016. Big Data’s Disparate Impact. California Law Review 104, 3 (2016), 671. doi:10.2139/ssrn.2477899.

    This is a long paper by page count, but it is not as nearly so mathematically dense as some of the other papers we are reading.

  • Discuss assignment papers and clarify questions or doubts

Week 5 (Feb. 10–14)

Tuesday

Shira Mitchell, Eric Potash, Solon Barocas, Alexander D’Amour, and Kristian Lum. 2018. Prediction-Based Decisions and Fairness: A Catalogue of Choices, Assumptions, and Definitions. arXiv [stat.AP]. arxiv:1811.07867.

Thursday
Review and Recap

Week 6 (Feb. 17–21)

Tuesday
No Class
Midterm due midnight Tuesday
Thursday

Kristian Lum and William Isaac. 2016. To predict and serve? Significance 13, 5 (October 2016), 14–19. doi:10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00960.x.

Week 7 (Feb. 24–28)

Tuesday

One of the following papers:

Danielle Ensign, Sorelle A. Friedler, Scott Neville, Carlos Scheidegger, Suresh Venkatasubramanian. 2018. Runaway Feedback Loops in Predictive Policing. In Proceedings of the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, PMLR 81:160–171. [video]

Danielle Ensign, Sorelle A. Friedler, Scott Neville, Carlos Scheidegger, Suresh Venkatasubramanian. 2017. Runaway Feedback Loops in Predictive Policing. In FAT/ML 2017. arXiv:1706.09847v1 [video]

Thursday

Chelsea Barabas, Madars Virza, Karthik Dinakar, Joichi Ito, Jonathan Zittrain. 2018. Interventions over Predictions: Reframing the Ethical Debate for Actuarial Risk Assessment. In Proceedings of the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, PMLR 81:62–76. [video]

Week 8 (Mar. 2–6)

Tuesday

Masoud Mansoury, Bamshad Mobasher, Robin Burke, and Mykola Pechenizkiy. 2019. Bias Disparity in Collaborative Recommendation: Algorithmic Evaluation and Comparison. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Recommendation in Multi-stakeholder Environments at RecSys 2019. arxiv:1908.00831v1

Thursday
Discuss the assignment readings and projects.

Week 9 (Mar. 9–13)

Tuesday

Alex Chohlas-Wood and E. S. Levine. 2019. A Recommendation Engine to Aid in Identifying Crime Patterns. INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics, Vol 49, No. 2. doi:10.1287/inte.2019.0985. [preprint]

Thursday
No class - work on assignments

Week 10 (Mar. 16–20)

Tuesday
Assignment paper discussion
Thursday

Chen, I., Johansson, F. D. and Sontag, D. (2018) ‘Why Is My Classifier Discriminatory?’, in Bengio, S. et al. (eds) Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 31. Curran Associates, Inc., pp. 3542–3553.

  • Assignments due Friday, March 20

Spring Break (Mar. 23–27)

No classes.

Week 11 (Mar. 30–Apr. 3)

Tuesday

Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein. 2020. “Introduction”, in Data Feminism. MIT Press. [online preprint]

Thursday

Ricardo Baeza-Yates. 2018. Bias on the web. Communications of the ACM (May 2018). doi:10.1145/3209581

Week 12 (Apr. 6–10)

Tuesday

Rishabh Mehrotra, James McInerney, Hugues Bouchard, Mounia Lalmas, and Fernando Diaz. 2018. Towards a Fair Marketplace: Counterfactual Evaluation of the trade-off between Relevance, Fairness & Satisfaction in Recommendation Systems. In Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM ’18). doi:10.1145/3269206.3272027

Thursday
No class - work on research projects.

Week 13 (Apr. 13–17)

Tuesday

Javier Sánchez-Monedero, Lina Dencik, and Lilian Edwards. 2020. What does it mean to “solve” the problem of discrimination in hiring? social, technical and legal perspectives from the UK on automated hiring systems. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT* ’20). doi:10.1145/3351095.3372849. [video]

Thursday
No class

Week 14 (Apr. 20–24)

Tuesday

Flavio P. Calmon, Dennis Wei, Karthikeyan Natesan Ramamurthy, Kush R. Varshney. 2017. Optimized Data Pre-Processing for Discrimination Prevention. arxiv:1704.03354.

Thursday
No class

Week 15 (Apr. 27–May 1)

Tuesday
Michael’s Opinions
Thursday
Present projects for peer feedback

Week F (May 4–8)

  • Project reports due Tuesday, May 5
  • Final due Friday, May 8

Epilogue

We will discuss this paper after the semester is over.

Anna Lauren Hoffmann. 2019. Where fairness fails: data, algorithms, and the limits of antidiscrimination discourse. Information, Communication and Society. Routledge, 22(7), pp. 900–915. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2019.1573912.