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News on Law & Ethics
What does it mean to be fair?
What does it mean for an algorithm to be biased? In U.S. law, unintentional bias is encoded via disparate impact, which occurs when a selection process has widely different outcomes […]
Predictive policing systems are increasingly used to determine how to allocate police across a city in order to best prevent crime. Discovered crime data (e.g., arrest counts) are used to […]
A key goal of the fair-ML community is to develop machine-learning based systems that, once introduced into a social context, can achieve social and legal outcomes such as fairness, justice, […]
Computers are increasingly used to make decisions that have significant impact on people’s lives. Often, these predictions can affect different population subgroups disproportionately. As a result, the issue of fairness […]
Sorelle Friedler is an associate professor of computer science at Haverford College and an affiliate at the Data & Society Research Institute. Her research focuses on the fairness and interpretability […]
Networked gatekeepers on social media increasingly influence which people and groups receive media attention. Many unknowingly direct much greater attention to men than to women. Can technologies support these gatekeepers […]
As online platforms monitor and intervene in the daily lives of billions of people, platforms are being used to govern enduring social problems. Field experiments could inform wise uses of […]
Media coverage of deaths of unarmed people of color at the hands of police sharply increased after the high-profile death of Michael Brown. We analyze a novel set of media […]
Theories of human behavior suggest that people’s decisions to join a group and their subsequent behavior are influenced by perceptions of what is socially normative. In online discussions, where unruly, […]
J. Nathan Matias organizes citizen behavioral science for a safer, fairer, more understanding internet. A Guatemalan American, Matias is an assistant professor in Cornell University’s Department of Communication. He is […]