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  1. Abstract

    Automated hiring systems are among the fastest-developing of all high-stakes AI systems. Among these are algorithmic personality tests that use insights from psychometric testing, and promise to surface personality traits indicative of future success based on job seekers’ resumes or social media profiles. We interrogate the validity of such systems using stability of the outputs they produce, noting that reliability is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for validity. Crucially, rather than challenging or affirming the assumptions made in psychometric testing — that personality is a meaningful and measurable construct, and that personality traits are indicative of future success on the job — we frame our audit methodology around testing the underlying assumptions made by the vendors of the algorithmic personality tests themselves. Our main contribution is the development of a socio-technical framework for auditing the stability of algorithmic systems. This contribution is supplemented with an open-source software library that implements the technical components of the audit, and can be used to conduct similar stability audits of algorithmic systems. We instantiate our framework with the audit of two real-world personality prediction systems, namely, Humantic AI and Crystal. The application of our audit framework demonstrates that both these systems show substantial instability with respect to key facets of measurement, and hence cannot be considered valid testing instruments.

     
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  2. It remains an open question how to determine the winner of an election given incomplete or uncertain voter preferences. One solution is to assume some probability space for the voting profile and declare that the candidates having the best chance of winning are the (co-)winners. We refer to this interpretation as the Most Probable Winner (MPW). In this paper, we focus on elections that use positional scoring rules, and propose an alternative winner interpretation, the Most Expected Winner (MEW), according to the expected performance of the candidates. We separate the uncertainty in voter preferences into the generation step and the observation step, which gives rise to a unified voting profile combining both incomplete and probabilistic voting profiles. We use this framework to establish the theoretical hardness of MEW over incomplete voter preferences, and then identify a collection of tractable cases for a variety of voting profiles, including those based on the popular Repeated Insertion Model (RIM) and its special case, the Mallows model. We develop solvers customized for various voter preference types to quantify the candidate performance for the individual voters, and propose a pruning strategy that optimizes computation. The performance of the proposed solvers and pruning strategy is evaluated extensively on real and synthetic benchmarks, showing that our methods are practical. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available June 18, 2024
  3. Counterfactuals are often described as 'retrospective,' focusing on hypothetical alternatives to a realized past. This description relates to an often implicit assumption about the structure and stability of exogenous variables in the system being modeled –– an assumption that is reasonable in many settings where counterfactuals are used. In this work, we consider cases where we might reasonably make a different assumption about exogenous variables, namely, that the exogenous noise terms of each unit do exhibit some unit-specific structure and/or stability. This leads us to a different use of counterfactuals — a 'forward-looking' rather than 'retrospective' counterfactual. We introduce counterfactual treatment choice, a type of treatment choice problem that motivates using forward-looking counterfactuals. We then explore how mismatches between interventional versus forward-looking counterfactual approaches to treatment choice, consistent with different assumptions about exogenous noise, can lead to counterintuitive results. 
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  4. In this work we use Equal Opportunity (EO) doctrines from political philosophy to make explicit the normative judgements embedded in different conceptions of algorithmic fairness. We contrast formal EO approaches that narrowly focus on fair contests at discrete decision points, with substantive EO doctrines that look at people’s fair life chances more holistically over the course of a lifetime. We use this taxonomy to provide a moral interpretation of the impossibility results as the incompatibility between different conceptions of a fair contest — foward-facing versus backward-facing — when people do not have fair life chances. We use this result to motivate substantive conceptions of algorithmic fairness and outline two plausible fair decision procedures based on the luck egalitarian doctrine of EO, and Rawls’s principle of fair equality of opportunity. 
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  5. Automated hiring systems are among the fastest-developing of all high-stakes AI systems. Among these are algorithmic personality tests that use insights from psychometric testing, and promise to surface personality traits indicative of future success based on job seekers' resumes or social media profiles. We interrogate the reliability of such systems using stability of the outputs they produce, noting that reliability is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for validity. We develop a methodology for an external audit of stability of algorithmic personality tests, and instantiate this methodology in an audit of two systems, Humantic AI and Crystal. Rather than challenging or affirming the assumptions made in psychometric testing --- that personality traits are meaningful and measurable constructs, and that they are indicative of future success on the job --- we frame our methodology around testing the underlying assumptions made by the vendors of the algorithmic personality tests themselves. In our audit of Humantic AI and Crystal, we find that both systems show substantial instability on key facets of measurement, and so cannot be considered valid testing instruments. For example, Crystal frequently computes different personality scores if the same resume is given in PDF vs. in raw text, violating the assumption that the output of an algorithmic personality test is stable across job-irrelevant input variations. Among other notable findings is evidence of persistent --- and often incorrect --- data linkage by Humantic AI. An open-source implementation of our auditing methodology, and of the audits of Humantic AI and Crystal, is available at https://github.com/DataResponsibly/hiring-stability-audit. 
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  6. The study of fairness in multiwinner elections focuses on settings where candidates have attributes. However, voters may also be divided into predefined populations under one or more attributes. The models that focus on candidate attributes alone may systematically under-represent smaller voter populations. Hence, we develop a model, DiRe Committee Winner Determination (DRCWD), which delineates candidate and voter attributes to select a committee by specifying diversity and representation constraints and a voting rule. We analyze its computational complexity and develop a heuristic algorithm, which finds the winning DiRe committee in under two minutes on 63% of the instances of synthetic datasets and on 100% of instances of real-world datasets. We also present an empirical analysis of feasibility and utility traded-off. Moreover, even when the attributes of candidates and voters coincide, it is important to treat them separately as diversity does not imply representation and vice versa. This is to say that having a female candidate on the committee, for example, is different from having a candidate on the committee who is preferred by the female voters, and who themselves may or may not be female. 
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  7. Responsible Data Science (RDS) and Responsible AI (RAI) have emerged as prominent areas of research and practice. Yet, educational materials and methodologies on this important subject still lack. In this paper, I will recount my experience in developing, teaching, and refining a technical course called “Responsible Data Science”, which tackles the issues of ethics in AI, legal compliance, data quality, algorithmic fairness and diversity, transparency of data and algorithms, privacy, and data protection. I will also describe a public education course called “We are AI: Taking Control of Technology” that brings these topics of AI ethics to the general audience in a peer-learning setting. I made all course materials are publicly available online, hoping to inspire others in the community to come together to form a deeper understanding of the pedagogical needs of RDS and RAI, and to develop and share the much-needed concrete educational materials and methodologies. 
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  8. Perspectives on the role and responsibility of the data-management research community in designing, developing, using, and overseeing automated decision systems. 
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  9. In the past few years, there has been much work on incorporating fairness requirements into algorithmic rankers, with contributions coming from the data management, algorithms, information retrieval, and recommender systems communities. In this survey we give a systematic overview of this work, offering a broad perspective that connects formalizations and algorithmic approaches across subfields. An important contribution of our work is in developing a common narrative around the value frameworks that motivate specific fairness-enhancing interventions in ranking. This allows us to unify the presentation of mitigation objectives and of algorithmic techniques to help meet those objectives or identify trade-offs. In the first part of this survey, we describe four classification frameworks for fairness-enhancing interventions, along which we relate the technical methods surveyed in this paper, discuss evaluation datasets, and present technical work on fairness in score-based ranking. In this second part of this survey, we present methods that incorporate fairness in supervised learning, and also give representative examples of recent work on fairness in recommendation and matchmaking systems. We also discuss evaluation frameworks for fair score-based ranking and fair learning-to-rank, and draw a set of recommendations for the evaluation of fair ranking methods. 
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