[Pl-seminar] TIME CHANGED TO 1:30PM: Seminar TOMORROW: Yuriy Brun: "Software Fairness"

[Nathaniel Yazdani]

Please note that the seminar time has been changed to 1:30pm, due to a
spurious double-booking of the room.

On Tue, Oct 29, 2019 at 9:09 AM Nathaniel Yazdani <yazdani.n at husky.neu.edu>
wrote:

> NUPRL Seminar Presents
>
> Yuriy Brun
> University of Massachusetts Amherst
>
> 1:30pm to 3:00pm
> Wednesday, October 30th, 2019
> Room 366 WVH (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/directions.html)
>
> Software Fairness
>
> Abstract
>
> Modern software contributes to important societal decisions, and yet we
> know very little about its fairness properties. Can software discriminate?
> Evidence of software discrimination has been found in systems that
> recommend criminal sentences, grant access to loans and other financial
> products, transcribe YouTube videos, translate text, and perform facial
> recognition. Systems that select what ads to show users can similarly
> discriminate. For example, a professional social network site could,
> hypothetically, learn stereotypes and only advertise stereotypically female
> jobs to women and stereotypically male ones to men. Despite existing
> evidence of software bias, and significant potential for negative
> consequences, little technology exists to test software for such bias, to
> enforce lack of bias, and to learn fair models from potentially biased
> data. Even defining what it means for software to discriminate is a complex
> task. I will present recent research that defines software fairness and
> discrimination; develops a testing-based, causality-capturing method for
> measuring if and how much software discriminates; and provides provable
> formal guarantees on software fairness. I will also describe open problems
> in software fairness and how recent advances in machine learning and
> natural language modeling can help address them. Overall, I will argue that
> enabling and ensuring software fairness requires solving research
> challenges across computer science, including in machine learning, software
> and systems engineering, human-computer interaction, and theoretical
> computer science.
>
> Bio
>
> Yuriy Brun is an associate professor with the College of Information and
> Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research
> interests include software engineering, software fairness and bias,
> self-adaptive systems, and distributed systems. He received his PhD from
> the University of Southern California in 2009 and was a Computing
> Innovation postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington until 2012.
> Prof. Brun is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award in 2015, the IEEE TCSC
> Young Achiever in Scalable Computing Award in 2013, a Best Paper Award in
> 2017, two ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards in 2011 and 2017, a
> Microsoft Research Software Engineering Innovation Foundation Award in
> 2014, a Google Faculty Research Award in 2015, a Lilly Fellowship for
> Teaching Excellence in 2017, a College Outstanding Teacher Award in 2017,
> and an ICSE 2015 Distinguished Reviewer Award.
>
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