skip to main content


Search for: All records

Award ID contains: 1633400

Note: When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external site maintained by the publisher. Some full text articles may not yet be available without a charge during the embargo (administrative interval).
What is a DOI Number?

Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from this site.

  1. Ethics is arguably the hottest product in Silicon Valley's hype cycle today, even as headlines decrying a lack of ethics in technology companies accumulate. After years of largely fruitless outside pressure to consider the consequences of digital technology products, the very recent past has seen a spike in the assignment of corporate resources in Silicon Valley to ethics, including hiring staff for roles we identify here as "ethics owners." In corporate parlance, "owning" a portfolio or project means holding responsibility for it, often across multiple divisions or hierarchies within the organization. Typically, the "owner" of a project does not bear sole responsibility for it, but rather oversees integration of that project across the organization. 
    more » « less
  2. The study of influence maximization in social networks has largely ignored disparate effects these algorithms might have on the individuals contained in the social network. Individuals may place a high value on receiving information, e.g. job openings or advertisements for loans. While well-connected individuals at the center of the network are likely to receive the information that is being distributed through the network, poorly connected individuals are systematically less likely to receive the information, producing a gap in access to the information between individuals. In this work, we study how best to spread information in a social network while minimizing this access gap. We propose to use the maximin social welfare function as an objective function, where we maximize the minimum probability of receiving the information under an intervention. We prove that in this setting this welfare function constrains the access gap whereas maximizing the expected number of nodes reached does not. We also investigate the difficulties of using the maximin, and present hardness results and analysis for standard greedy strategies. Finally, we investigate practical ways of optimizing for the maximin, and give empirical evidence that a simple greedy-based strategy works well in practice. 
    more » « less