On February 10th and 11th, UnBias participated in the 2017 Explorers Fair Expo at the Nottingham Broadway cinema to engage with parent, children and citizens of any age in discussing the ways in which algorithms affect our lives.

Over the course of the two days we organised three different styles of public engagement activities. On Friday the 10th, Elvira ran ‘Drop in activities’ on the theme “Interacting with different web browsers & search engines – Do you care?”. The activities consisted of hands-on exercises comparing results when using different browsers and/or search engines, as trigger for further enquiry and discussion about their people’s preferences and/or concerns regarding: algorithms, filtering systems, fairness and possible recommendations.

On Saturday 11th the activities consisted of two parts. The first part was a more traditional style presentation by Ansgar on the topic “Who is in charge? You or the algorithm?”

This was followed by a mini ‘Youth Juries’ session “UnBias Youth Juries: A youth-led discussion about algorithm fairness” facilitated by Liz, with support from Virginia and Monica.

As expected for this kind of event, the audience was quite mixed, ranging from seven year old kids with their accompanying parents, to 17/18 year old teenagers. Especially the teenage Youth Juries participants were highly engaged leading to stimulating and thought provoking discussions.