Abhijnan Chakraborty - Fairness in Algorithmic Decision Making

Algorithmic (data-driven) decision making is increasingly being used to assist or replace human decision making in domains with high societal impact, such as banking (estimating creditworthiness), recruiting (ranking job applicants), judiciary (offender profiling), healthcare (identifying high-risk patients who need additional care) and journalism (recommending news-stories). Consequently, in recent times, multiple research works have uncovered the potential for bias (unfairness) in algorithmic decisions in different contexts, and proposed mechanisms to control (mitigate) such biases. However, the emphasis of existing works has largely been on fairness in supervised classification or regression tasks, and fairness issues in other scenarios remain relatively unexplored. In this talk, I will cover our recent works on incorporating fairness in recommendation and matching algorithms in multi-sided platforms, where the algorithms need to fairly consider the preferences of multiple stakeholders. I will discuss the notions of fairness in these contexts and propose techniques to achieve them. I will conclude the talk with a list of open questions and directions for future work.