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1. Privacy for All: Ensuring Fair and Equitable Privacy Protections

   Ekstrand, Michael D.; Joshaghani, Rezvan; Mehrpouyan, Hoda (January 2018, 1st Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency)

   null (Ed.)

   In this position paper, we argue for applying recent research on ensuring sociotechnical systems are fair and non-discriminatory to the privacy protections those systems may provide. Privacy literature seldom considers whether a proposed privacy scheme protects all persons uniformly, irrespective of membership in protected classes or particular risk in the face of privacy failure. Just as algorithmic decision-making systems may have discriminatory outcomes even without explicit or deliberate discrimination, so also privacy regimes may disproportionately fail to protect vulnerable members of their target population, resulting in disparate impact with respect to the effectiveness of privacy protections.We propose a research agenda that will illuminate this issue, along with related issues in the intersection of fairness and privacy, and present case studies that show how the outcomes of this research may change existing privacy and fairness research. We believe it is important to ensure that technologies and policies intended to protect the users and subjects of information systems provide such protection in an equitable fashion. 

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2. Setting the Right Expectations: Algorithmic Recourse Over Time

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3617694.3623251  

   Fonseca, João; Bell, Andrew; Abrate, Carlo; Bonchi, Francesco; Stoyanovich, Julia (October 2023, EAAMO '23: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization)

   Algorithmic systems are often called upon to assist in high-stakes decision making. In light of this, algorithmic recourse, the principle wherein individuals should be able to take action against an undesirable outcome made by an algorithmic system, is receiving growing attention. The bulk of the literature on algorithmic recourse to-date focuses primarily on how to provide recourse to a single individual, overlooking a critical element: the effects of a continuously changing context. Disregarding these effects on recourse is a significant oversight, since, in almost all cases, recourse consists of an individual making a first, unfavorable attempt, and then being given an opportunity to make one or several attempts at a later date — when the context might have changed. This can create false expectations, as initial recourse recommendations may become less reliable over time due to model drift and competition for access to the favorable outcome between individuals. In this work we propose an agent-based simulation framework for studying the effects of a continuously changing environment on algorithmic recourse. In particular, we identify two main effects that can alter the reliability of recourse for individuals represented by the agents: (1) competition with other agents acting upon recourse, and (2) competition with new agents entering the environment. Our findings highlight that only a small set of specific parameterizations result in algorithmic recourse that is reliable for agents over time. Consequently, we argue that substantial additional work is needed to understand recourse reliability over time, and to develop recourse methods that reward agents’ effort. 

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3. Designing Representative Model Worlds to Study Socio-Technical Phenomena: A Case Study of Communication Patterns in Engineering Systems Design

   https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4048295  

   Chaudhari, Ashish M.; Gralla, Erica L.; Szajnfarber, Zoe; Grogan, Paul T.; Panchal, Jitesh H. (January 2020, Journal of Mechanical Design)

   Abstract The engineering of complex systems involves large number of individuals within multiple organizations spanning multiple years. Since it is challenging to perform empirical studies directly on real organizations at scale, some researchers in systems engineering and design have begun relying on abstracted model worlds that aim to be representative of the reference socio-technical system, but only preserve some aspects of it. However, there is a lack of corresponding knowledge on how to design representative model worlds for socio-technical research. Our objective is to create such knowledge through a reflective case study of the development of a model world. This “inner” study examines how two factors influence interdisciplinary communication during a concurrent design process. The reference real world system is a mission design laboratory (MDL) at NASA, and the model world is a simplified engine design problem in an undergraduate classroom environment. Our analysis focuses on the thought process followed, the key model world design decisions made, and a critical assessment of the extent to which communication phenomena in the model world (engine experiment) are representative of the real world (NASA's MDL). We find that the engine experiment preserves some but not all of the communication patterns of interest, and we present case-specific lessons learned for achieving and increasing representativeness in this type of study. More generally, we find that representativeness depends not on matching subjects, tasks, and context separately, but rather on the behavior that results from the interactions of these three dimensions. 

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4. Molecular storytelling: a conceptual framework for teaching and learning with molecular case studies

   https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2024.1379515  

   Trujillo, Caleb M; Dutta, Shuchismita (June 2024, Frontiers in Education)

   Molecular case studies (MCSs) provide educational opportunities to explore biomolecular structure and function using data from public bioinformatics resources. The conceptual basis for the design of MCSs has yet to be fully discussed in the literature, so we present molecular storytelling as a conceptual framework for teaching with case studies. Whether the case study aims to understand the biology of a specific disease and design its treatments or track the evolution of a biosynthetic pathway, vast amounts of structural and functional data, freely available in public bioinformatics resources, can facilitate rich explorations in atomic detail. To help biology and chemistry educators use these resources for instruction, a community of scholars collaborated to create the Molecular CaseNet. This community uses storytelling to explore biomolecular structure and function while teaching biology and chemistry. In this article, we define the structure of an MCS and present an example. Then, we articulate the evolution of a conceptual framework for developing and using MCSs. Finally, we related our framework to the development of technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge (TPCK) for educators in the Molecular CaseNet. The report conceptualizes an interdisciplinary framework for teaching about the molecular world and informs lesson design and education research. 

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5. Ordering of Trotterization: Impact on Errors in Quantum Simulation of Electronic Structure

   https://doi.org/10.3390/e21121218  

   Tranter, Andrew; Love, Peter J.; Mintert, Florian; Wiebe, Nathan; Coveney, Peter V. (December 2019, Entropy)

   Trotter–Suzuki decompositions are frequently used in the quantum simulation of quantum chemistry. They transform the evolution operator into a form implementable on a quantum device, while incurring an error—the Trotter error. The Trotter error can be made arbitrarily small by increasing the Trotter number. However, this increases the length of the quantum circuits required, which may be impractical. It is therefore desirable to find methods of reducing the Trotter error through alternate means. The Trotter error is dependent on the order in which individual term unitaries are applied. Due to the factorial growth in the number of possible orderings with respect to the number of terms, finding an optimal strategy for ordering Trotter sequences is difficult. In this paper, we propose three ordering strategies, and assess their impact on the Trotter error incurred. Initially, we exhaustively examine the possible orderings for molecular hydrogen in a STO-3G basis. We demonstrate how the optimal ordering scheme depends on the compatibility graph of the Hamiltonian, and show how it varies with increasing bond length. We then use 44 molecular Hamiltonians to evaluate two strategies based on coloring their incompatibility graphs, while considering the properties of the obtained colorings. We find that the Trotter error for most systems involving heavy atoms, using a reference magnitude ordering, is less than 1 kcal/mol. Relative to this, the difference between ordering schemes can be substantial, being approximately on the order of millihartrees. The coloring-based ordering schemes are reasonably promising—particularly for systems involving heavy atoms—however further work is required to increase dependence on the magnitude of terms. Finally, we consider ordering strategies based on the norm of the Trotter error operator, including an iterative method for generating the new error operator terms added upon insertion of a term into an ordered Hamiltonian. 

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