Abstract: 

Risk assessment is a popular task when machine learning is used for automated decision making. For example, Jack’s risk of defaulting on a loan is 8, Jill’s is 2; Ed’s risk of recidivism is 9, Peter’s is 1. We know that this task definition comes with impossibility results for group fairness, where one cannot simultaneously satisfy desirable probabilistic measures of fairness. I will highlight recent findings in terms of these impossibility results. Next, I will present work on how machine learning can be used to generate aspirational data (i.e., data that are free from biases of real-world data). Such data are useful for recognizing and detecting sources of unfairness in machine learning models besides biased data. Time-permitting, I will discuss steps in measuring our algorithmically infused societies.

Bio: 

Tina Eliassi-Rad is a Professor of Computer Science at Northeastern University. She is also a core faculty member at Northeastern University's Network Science Institute. Prior to joining Northeastern, Tina was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Rutgers University; and before that she was a Member of Technical Staff and Principal Investigator at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Tina earned her Ph.D. in Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research is rooted in data mining and machine learning; and spans theory, algorithms, and applications of big data from networked representations of physical and social phenomena. She has over 100 peer-reviewed publications (including a few best paper and best paper runner-up awardees). Tina's work has been applied to personalized search on the World-Wide Web, statistical indices of large-scale scientific simulation data, fraud detection, mobile ad targeting, cyber situational awareness, and ethics in machine learning. Her algorithms have been incorporated into systems used by the government and industry (e.g., IBM System G Graph Analytics) as well as open-source software (e.g., Stanford Network Analysis Project). In 2017, Tina served as the program co-chair for the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining  and as the program co-chair for the International Conference on Network Science . In 2020, she is serving as the program co-chair for the International Conference on Computational Social Science. Tina received an Outstanding Mentor Award from the Office of Science at the US Department of Energy in 2010; and became a Fellow of the ISI Foundation in Turin Italy in 2019.