A Month of Conferences and Workshops

June was a month of conferences and workshops for UnBias. The 3rd UnBias project meeting on June 1st, hosted by our Edinburgh partners this time, was quickly followed by the Ethicomp and EuroDIG conferences which both took place from June 5th to 8th.

Ethicomp was attended by Elvira and Menisha and featured the presentation of our paper on “Editorial responsibilities arising from personalization algorithms” as well as the UnBias related paper on “When AI goes to war: youth opinion, fictional reality and autonomous weapons” by Elvira that was part of the “When AI Goes to War” project funded by the Digital Economy Crucible 2016.

At the same time as Elvira and Menisha were at Ethicomp, Ansgar represented UnBias at EuroDIG where he led a flash session on Accountability and Regulation of Algorithms and supported the panel discussion on The Internet in the “post truth era”, which was led/moderated by Menno Ettema (Council of Europe – No Hate Speech Movement coordinator).

After having returned from these conferences Ansgar joined Helena on June 14th for a meeting with people at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. This was a free form discussion meeting aimed at identifying possible points of common interest that might lead to future collaborations.

June 19th was the next date on the project calendar this month. This time the event of the day was the 2nd UnBias stakeholders workshop. The format this time was a workshop where the first half explored a concrete example of evaluating algorithm fairness based on only information about the output statistics or including high-level information about the algorithm decision criteria. The second half explored the concept of an empathy tool-kit for system designers. We are pleased to report that the discussions were once again very engaged resulting in a good deal of data that is currently being transcribed for analysis and summary.

Four days later, Ansgar was on a plane to the US to attend the WebSci’17 conference in Troy, NY. On June 25th we ran a stakeholder engagement workshop including presentations by two of our stakeholder partners, Rene Arnold (WIK-Consult) and John Havens (IEEE Global Initiative for Ethical Design in AI and Autonomous Systems). Recordings from this discussion are also being transcribed for analysis and the summary of this will be published on this site along side the other stakeholder engagement workshops. Later during the conference we also presented our poster on Algorithm Fairness in Online Information Systems and our paper on Youth reflections and recommendations on algorithm fairness.

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