UnBias: Emancipating Users Against Algorithmic Biases for a Trusted Digital Economy – two publications announced

The UnBias project team are pleased to announce the publication of two papers:

Algorithmic Fairness in Online Information Mediating Sytems

This paper explores the challenges around fair information access when the limits of human attention require algorithmic assistance for ‘€finding the diamond in the coal mountain’. While often demanded by users, the seemingly intuitive concept of fairness has proven to be very difficult to operationalise for implementation in algorithms. Here we present two pilot studies aimed at getting a better understanding of the conceptualisation of algorithmic fairness by users. The first was a multi-stakeholder focus-group discussion, the second a user experiment/questionnaire. Based on our data we arrive at a picture of fairness that is highly dependent on context and informedness of users, and possibly inherently misleading due to the implied projecting of human intentions onto an algorithmic process.

Young People’s Policy Recommendations on Algorithm Fairness

This paper explores the policy recommendations made by young people regarding algorithm fairness. It describes a piece of ongoing research developed to bring children and young people to the front line of the debate regarding children’s digital rights. We employed the Youth Juries methodology which was designed to facilitate learning through discussions. The juries capture the deliberation process on a specific digital right, the right to know how algorithms govern and influence the Web and its users. Preliminary results show that young people demand to know more about algorithms, they want more transparency, more options, and more control about the way algorithms use their personal data.

Further information on the UnBias Research Team can be found here.

See the UnBias blog and twitter for more information

Partners: University of Oxford and University of Edinburgh