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  1. While the stable marriage problem and its variants model a vast range of matching markets, they fail to capture complex agent relationships, such as the affiliation of applicants and employers in an interview marketplace. To model this problem, the existing literature on matching with externalities permits agents to provide complete and total rankings over matchings based off of both their own and their affiliates' matches. This complete ordering restriction is unrealistic, and further the model may have an empty core. To address this, we introduce the Dichotomous Affiliate Stable Matching (DASM) Problem, where agents' preferences indicate dichotomous acceptance or rejection of another agent in the marketplace, both for themselves and their affiliates. We also assume the agent's preferences over entire matchings are determined by a general weighted valuation function of their (and their affiliates') matches. Our results are threefold: (1) we use a human study to show that real-world matching rankings follow our assumed valuation function; (2) we prove that there always exists a stable solution by providing an efficient, easily-implementable algorithm that finds such a solution; and (3) we experimentally validate the efficiency of our algorithm versus a linear-programming-based approach. 
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  2. COVID-19 exposure-notification apps have struggled to gain adoption. Existing literature posits as potential causes of this low adoption: privacy concerns, insufficient data transparency, and the type of appeal – collective- vs. individual-good – used to frame the app. As policy guidance suggests using tailored advertising to evaluate the effects of these factors, we present the first field study of COVID-19 contact tracing apps with a randomized, control trial of 14 different advertisements for CovidDefense, Louisiana’s COVID-19 exposure-notification app. We find that all three hypothesized factors – privacy, data transparency, and appeals framing – relate to app adoption, even when controlling for age, gender, and community density. Our results offer (1) the first field evidence supporting the use of collective-good appeals, (2) nuanced findings regarding the efficacy of data and privacy transparency, the effects of which are moderated by appeal framing and potential users’ demographics, and (3) field-evidence-based guidance for future efforts to encourage pro-social health technology adoption. 
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  3. Facial analysis systems have been deployed by large companies and critiqued by scholars and activists for the past decade. Many existing algorithmic audits examine the performance of these systems on later stage elements of facial analysis systems like facial recognition and age, emotion, or perceived gender prediction; however, a core component to these systems has been vastly understudied from a fairness perspective: face detection, sometimes called face localization. Since face detection is a pre-requisite step in facial analysis systems, the bias we observe in face detection will flow downstream to the other components like facial recognition and emotion prediction. Additionally, no prior work has focused on the robustness of these systems under various perturbations and corruptions, which leaves open the question of how various people are impacted by these phenomena. We present the first of its kind detailed benchmark of face detection systems, specifically examining the robustness to noise of commercial and academic models. We use both standard and recently released academic facial datasets to quantitatively analyze trends in face detection robustness. Across all the datasets and systems, we generally find that photos of individuals who are masculine presenting, older, of darker skin type, or have dim lighting are more susceptible to errors than their counterparts in other identities. 
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  4. Deep neural networks (DNNs) are increasingly used in real-world applications (e.g. facial recognition). This has resulted in concerns about the fairness of decisions made by these models. Various notions and measures of fairness have been proposed to ensure that a decision-making system does not disproportionately harm (or benefit) particular subgroups of the population. In this paper, we argue that traditional notions of fairness that are only based on models' outputs are not sufficient when the model is vulnerable to adversarial attacks. We argue that in some cases, it may be easier for an attacker to target a particular subgroup, resulting in a form of robustness bias. We show that measuring robustness bias is a challenging task for DNNs and propose two methods to measure this form of bias. We then conduct an empirical study on state-of-the-art neural networks on commonly used real-world datasets such as CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Adience, and UTKFace and show that in almost all cases there are subgroups (in some cases based on sensitive attributes like race, gender, etc) which are less robust and are thus at a disadvantage. We argue that this kind of bias arises due to both the data distribution and the highly complex nature of the learned decision boundary in the case of DNNs, thus making mitigation of such biases a non-trivial task. Our results show that robustness bias is an important criterion to consider while auditing real-world systems that rely on DNNs for decision making. Code to reproduce all our results can be found here: https://github.com/nvedant07/Fairness-Through-Robustness 
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  5. The design of optimal auctions is a problem of interest in economics, game theory and computer science. Despite decades of effort, strategyproof, revenue-maximizing auction designs are still not known outside of restricted settings. However, recent methods using deep learning have shown some success in approximating optimal auctions, recovering several known solutions and outperforming strong baselines when optimal auctions are not known. In addition to maximizing revenue, auction mechanisms may also seek to encourage socially desirable constraints such as allocation fairness or diversity. However, these philosophical notions neither have standardization nor do they have widely accepted formal definitions. In this paper, we propose PreferenceNet, an extension of existing neural-network-based auction mechanisms to encode constraints using (potentially human-provided) exemplars of desirable allocations. In addition, we introduce a new metric to evaluate an auction allocations' adherence to such socially desirable constraints and demonstrate that our proposed method is competitive with current state-of-the-art neural-network based auction designs. We validate our approach through human subject research and show that we are able to effectively capture real human preferences. 
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