Asia J. Biega

"Designing responsible information systems"

( MPI-SWS talk in Kooperation mit dem Fachbereich Informatik)

Information systems have the potential to enhance or limit opportunities when mediating user interactions. They also have the potential to violate privacy by accumulating observational data into detailed user profiles or by exposing people in sensitive contexts. This talk will cover measures and mechanisms we have proposed for mitigating various threats to user well-being in online information ecosystems. In particular, I am going to focus on two contributions in the areas of algorithmic fairness and privacy. The first contribution demonstrates how to operationalize the notion of equity in the context of search systems and how to design optimization models that achieve equity while accounting for human cognitive biases. The second ties our empirical work on profiling privacy and data collection to concepts in data protection laws. Finally, I will discuss the necessity for a holistic approach to responsible technology, from studying different types of harms, through development of different types of interventions, up to taking a step back and refusing technologies that cannot be fixed by technical tweaks.

Bio: Asia J. Biega is a postdoctoral researcher in the Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics in AI (FATE) Group at Microsoft Research Montréal. A common theme in her research is protecting user rights and well-being. Through interdisciplinary collaborations, she designs ethically, socially, and legally responsible information and social computing systems and studies how they interact with and influence their users. Before joining Microsoft Research, she completed her PhD summa cum laude at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and Saarland University. Her doctoral work focused on the issues of privacy and fairness in search systems. She has published her work in leading information retrieval and data mining venues, and has been serving on the program committees of SIGIR, KDD, FAT*, and the senior program committee of SIGIR. Beyond academia, her perspectives and methodological approaches are informed by an industrial experience, including work on privacy infrastructure at Google and consulting Microsoft product teams on issues related to FATE and privacy.