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Abstract Decisions involving algorithmic rankings affect our lives in many ways, from product recommendations, receiving scholarships, to securing jobs. While tools have been developed for interactively constructing fair consensus rankings from a handful of rankings, addressing the more complex real‐world scenario— where diverse opinions are represented by a larger collection of rankings— remains a challenge. In this paper, we address these challenges by reformulating the exploration of rankings as a dimension reduction problem in a system called FairSpace. FairSpace provides new views, including Fair Divergence View and Cluster Views, by juxtaposing fairness metrics of different local and alternative global consensus rankings to aid ranking analysis tasks. We illustrate the effectiveness of FairSpace through a series of use cases, demonstrating via interactive workflows that users are empowered to create local consensuses by grouping rankings similar in their fairness or utility properties, followed by hierarchically aggregating local consensuses into a global consensus through direct manipulation. We discuss how FairSpace opens the possibility for advances in dimension reduction visualization to benefit the research area of supporting fair decision‐making in ranking based decision‐making contexts. Code, datasets and demo video available at:osf.io/d7cwk 

Automated decision-making systems are increasingly deployed in domains such as hiring and credit approval where negative outcomes can have substantial ramifications for decision subjects. Thus, recent research has focused on providing explanations that help decision subjects understand the decision system and enable them to take actionable recourse to change their outcome. Popular counterfactual explanation techniques aim to achieve this by describing alterations to an instance that would transform a negative outcome to a positive one. Unfortunately, little user evaluation has been performed to assess which of the many counterfactual approaches best achieve this goal. In this work, we conduct a crowd-sourced between-subjects user study (N = 252) to examine the effects of counterfactual explanation type and presentation on lay decision subjects’ understandings of automated decision systems. We find that the region-based counterfactual type significantly increases objective understanding, subjective understanding, and response confidence as compared to the point-based type. We also find that counterfactual presentation significantly effects response time and moderates the effect of counterfactual type for response confidence, but not understanding. A qualitative analysis reveals how decision subjects interact with different explanation configurations and highlights unmet needs for explanation justification. Our results provide valuable insights and recommendations for the development of counterfactual explanation techniques towards achieving practical actionable recourse and empowering lay users to seek justice and opportunity in automated decision workflows. 

The process of training deep learning models produces a huge amount of meta-data, including but not limited to losses, hidden feature embeddings, and gradients. Model diagnosis tools have been developed to analyze losses and feature embeddings with the aim to improve the performance of these models. However, gradients, despite carrying rich information that is potentially relevant for model interpretation and data debugging, have yet to be fully explored due to their size and complexity. Each single gradient has a size as large as the number of parameters of the neural net - often measured in the tens of millions. This makes it extremely challenging to efficiently collect, store, and analyze large numbers of gradients in these models. In this work, we develop MetaStore to fill this gap. MetaStore leverages our observation that storing certain compact intermediate results produced in the back propagation process, namely, the prefix and suffix gradients, is sufficient for the exact restoration of the original gradient. These prefix and suffix gradients are much more compact than the original gradients, thus allowing us to address the gradient collection and storage challenges. Furthermore, MetaStore features a rich set of analytics operators that allow the users to analyze the gradients for data debugging or model interpretation. Rather than first having to restore the original gradients and then run analytics on top of this decompressed view, MetaStore directly executes these operators on the compact prefix and suffix structures, making gradient-based analytics efficient and scalable. Our experiments on popular deep learning models such as VGG, BERT, and ResNet and benchmark image and text datasets demonstrate that MetaStore outperforms strong baseline methods from 4 to 678x in storage costs and from 2 to 1000x in running time. 

Amid corrosion degradation of metallic structures causing expenses nearing 3 trillion or 4% of the GDP annually along with major safety risks, the adoption of AI technologies for accelerating the materials science life-cycle for developing materials with better corrosive properties is paramount. While initial machine learning models for corrosion assessment are being proposed in the literature, their incorporation into end-to-end tools for field experimentation by corrosion scientists remains largely unexplored. To fill this void, our university data science team in collaboration with the materials science unit at the Army Research Lab have jointly developed MOSS, an innovative AI-based digital platform to support material science corrosion research. MOSS features user-friendly iPadOS app for in-field corrosion progression data collection, deep-learning corrosion assessor, robust data repository system for long-term experimental data modeling, and visual analytics web portal for material science research. In this demonstration, we showcase the key innovations of the MOSS platform via use cases supporting the corrosion exploration processes, with the promise of accelerating the discovery of new materials. We open a MOSS video demo at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzcxMMRsxkE 

Subset selection is an integral component of AI systems that is increasingly affecting people’s livelihoods in applications ranging from hiring, healthcare, education, to financial decisions. Subset selections powered by AI-based methods include top- analytics, data summarization, clustering, and multi-winner voting. While group fairness auditing tools have been proposed for classification systems, these state-of-the-art tools are not directly applicable to measuring and conceptualizing fairness in selected subsets. In this work, we introduce the first comprehensive auditing framework, FINS, to support stakeholders in interpretably quantifying group fairness across a diverse range of subset-specific fairness concerns. FINS offers a family of novel measures that provide a flexible means to audit group fairness for fairness goals ranging from item-based, score-based, and a combination thereof. FINS provides one unified easy-to-understand interpretation across these different fairness problems. Further, we develop guidelines through the FINS Fair Subset Chart, that supports auditors in determining which measures are relevant to their problem context and fairness objectives. We provide a comprehensive mapping between each fairness measure and the belief system (i.e., worldview) that is encoded within its measurement of fairness. Lastly, we demonstrate the interpretability and efficacy of FINS in supporting the identification of real bias with case studies using AirBnB listings and voter records. 

Combining the preferences of many rankers into one single consensus ranking is critical for consequential applications from hiring and admissions to lending. While group fairness has been extensively studied for classification, group fairness in rankings and in particular rank aggregation remains in its infancy. Recent work introduced the concept of fair rank aggregation for combining rankings but restricted to the case when candidates have a single binary protected attribute, i.e., they fall into two groups only. Yet it remains an open problem how to create a consensus ranking that represents the preferences of all rankers while ensuring fair treatment for candidates with multiple protected attributes such as gender, race, and nationality. In this work, we are the first to define and solve this open Multi-attribute Fair Consensus Ranking (MFCR) problem. As a foundation, we design novel group fairness criteria for rankings, called MANI-Rank, ensuring fair treatment of groups defined by individual protected attributes and their intersection. Leveraging the MANI-Rank criteria, we develop a series of algorithms that for the first time tackle the MFCR problem. Our experimental study with a rich variety of consensus scenarios demonstrates our MFCR methodology is the only approach to achieve both intersectional and protected attribute fairness while also representing the preferences expressed through many base rankings. Our real-world case study on merit scholarships illustrates the effectiveness of our MFCR methods to mitigate bias across multiple protected attributes and their intersections.