Category Archives: project update

Our Key Findings!

For the past two years our UnBias project has been exploring issues around ‘unfairness’ in algorithmic systems. Our research work has identified the existence of concerns across different societal and professional groups over the contemporary prevalence of algorithm driven online platforms. At the same time, we have also identified amongst these groups a desire for change to improve the user experience of platforms. Our analysis highlights several opportunities for positive change – in particular in relation to education, societal engagement and policy.

As the UnBias project draws to a close, we can a report a range of substantial findings. A summary can be downloaded here or watched as a short narrated slideshow below.

You can also find more details about our key findings and outputs here.

From December 2018 our project team will be working on a new project to follow on from UnBias. ReEnTrust will identify mechanisms to foster trust between users, algorithms and platforms.

UnBias EthicAl Hackathon!

Earlier this year the UnBias team ran its first Ethical Hackathon. These are a new kind of event developed by members of the Human Centred Computing theme at Oxford. They works as a twist on the traditional hackathon; by building on principles of responsible innovation, our ethical hackathons are geared towards forefronting ethical issues alongside design ones in the completion of a task.

In the ethical hackathon teams work together to carry out a competitive design task. In addition to thinking about technical features of design they are required to address the social and ethical implications of the particular technology involved. They are challenged to identify novel and creative solutions that embed ethical considerations into their design. Teams are interdisciplinary so that they can share expertise and learn from each other in a fun environment. They are then assessed by a panel of experts who judge the technical quality of their work alongside how well they have worked together to identify and address ethical concerns.

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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.

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Publication of 1st WP4 workshop report

We are please to announce that the report summarizing the outcomes of the first UnBias project stakeholder engagement workshop is now available for public dissemination.

The workshop took place on February 3rd 2017 at the Digital Catapult centre in London, UK. It brought together participants from academia, education, NGOs and enterprises to discuss fairness in relation to algorithmic practice and design. At the heart of the discussion were four case studies highlighting fake news, personalisation, gaming the system, and transparency.

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IEEE Standard for Algorithm Bias Considerations

As part of our stakeholder engagement work towards the development of algorithm design and regulation recommendations UnBias is engaging with the IEEE Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems to develop an IEEE Standard for Algorithm Bias Considerations, designated P7003. The P7003 working group is chaired by Ansgar Koene and will have its first web-meeting on May 5th 2017.

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