Our old friend Piotr, current postdoc at Northeastern, and graduate from the group is visiting from his new home beyond the Atlantic. This coming Thursday, Piotr will give a short about his most recent work. Details below.
- Time: Thursday, Sept 6th. 11AM
- Location: Technical University of Denmark.B321, lab-space
- Title: Fairness in ranking
Abstract: Ranked lists of persons and items are a core part of the user experience in many online services, such as search, social media feeds, hiring, and dating sites. Studies have shown disparate amount of attention received by high rank results, potentially leading to loss of opportunity and access to resources among the lower ranked items. In this short talk I will give an overview of the work on individual and group fairness in ranked lists and focus on our work in progress: a novel metric for investigating group unfairness in ranked lists. Our approach relies on estimating the amount of attention given to members of a protected group and comparing it to that group’s representation in a defined population. It offers two major developments compared to the state of the art. First, rather than assuming a logarithmic loss in importance as a function of the rank, we allow for attention distributions that are specific to the audited service and the habits of its users. For example, more items are consumed in a single viewing of a social media feed than as a result of a single query in a web search engine. Second, we allow non-binary protected attributes (gender, race, etc.), both to better reflect the way individuals identify, but also to enable measurements on aggregates of multiple search runs, rather than separately for each result list.We investigate the properties of the metric and compare them to the behavior of other established approaches using synthetic ranked lists. Finally, we showcase the metric through a simulated audit of a number of hiring and dating services.
sune lehmann 