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1. Kenneth Arrow's Last Theorem

   https://doi.org/10.22574/jmid.2024.12.002  

   Milgrom, Paul (December 2024, Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design)

   In Kenneth Arrow's last week of life at age 95, he reported that I began my research career with an impossibility theorem. If I had time now, my last theorem would be an impossibility theorem about social choice for environmental policy. This paper completes the formalization, proof, and discussion of the theorem that Arrow then described. 

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2. My Big, Fat 50-Year Journey

   https://doi.org/10.1162/coli_a_00499  

   Palmer, Martha (March 2024, Computational Linguistics)

   My most heartfelt thanks to ACL for this tremendous honor. I’m completely thrilled. I cannot tell you how surprised I was when I got Iryna’s email. It is amazing that my first ACL conference since 2019 in Florence includes this award. What a wonderful way to be back with all of my friends and family here at ACL. I’m going to tell you about my big fat 50-year journey. What have I been doing for the last 50 years? Well, finding meaning, quite literally in words. Or in other words, exploring how computational lexical semantics can support natural language understanding. This is going to be quick. Hold onto your hats, here we go. 

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3. The Possibility of Fairness: Revisiting the Impossibility Theorem in Practice

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3593013.3594007  

   Bell, Andrew; Bynum, Lucius; Drushchak, Nazarii; Zakharchenko, Tetiana; Rosenblatt, Lucas; Stoyanovich, Julia (June 2023, FAccT '23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency)

   The “impossibility theorem” — which is considered foundational in algorithmic fairness literature — asserts that there must be trade-offs between common notions of fairness and performance when fitting statistical models, except in two special cases: when the prevalence of the outcome being predicted is equal across groups, or when a perfectly accurate predictor is used. However, theory does not always translate to practice. In this work, we challenge the implications of the impossibility theorem in practical settings. First, we show analytically that, by slightly relaxing the impossibility theorem (to accommodate a practitioner’s perspective of fairness), it becomes possible to identify abundant sets of models that satisfy seemingly incompatible fairness constraints. Second, we demonstrate the existence of these models through extensive experiments on five real-world datasets. We conclude by offering tools and guidance for practitioners to understand when — and to what degree — fairness along multiple criteria can be achieved. This work has an important implication for the community: achieving fairness along multiple metrics for multiple groups (and their intersections) is much more possible than was previously believed. 

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4. Engineering the Future through Synthetic Biology

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s12257-022-0191-9  

   Moon, Tae Seok (May 2023, Biotechnology and Bioprocess Engineering)

   The last two decades have witnessed tremendous progress in synthetic biology. Despite the technological advances, the maturing field has yet to transition from fundamental study to translational practice. In this perspective article, I discuss my vision to enable this transition. With this vision, our next generation will solve global problems through synthetic biology. 

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5. The participation role of the researcher as a co-operative achievement

   https://doi.org/10.7146/si.v4i2.127257  

   Goico, Sara (June 2021, Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality)

   null (Ed.)

   In this paper, I examine my role as a researcher doing video-based fieldwork in mainstream classrooms with deaf youths in Iquitos, Peru through the lens of participation frameworks that emerged within moments of situated interaction. While conducting video-based fieldwork, I attempted to primarily occupy the role of a passive participant-observer in order to capture the deaf students’ everyday interactions with minimal interference from the researcher. As I will develop in the paper, it is evident that my status within the classroom participation frameworks was dynamic. While I often was not attended to in the participation framework and positioned as a ratified overhearer of the unfolding interaction, my status could quickly shift as the students and teacher responded to my presence. Moments when my status in the participation framework changed make visible the various roles that I occupied in the classroom, from an observer, to a confidant, to an authority figure. Through interactional extracts, I illustrate how the roles that I occupy in the classroom social ecology are a moment-by-moment co-operative achievement between members of the class and myself. 

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