UnBias – Impact

EPSRC Impact Exploration Grant

An interconnecting project with UnBias is an EPSRC Impact Exploration Grant which was awarded to the Nottingham UnBias team.  The award has enabled them to engage members of the public of all ages with another output of the UnBias project – the Fairness Toolkit.   The workshops focused on a component of the Fairness Toolkit; the UnBias Awareness Cards.

Two workshops each were run with those aged 13-17 years, 18-29 years, 30-50 years and the over 65s to gain feedback on the cards, and to give them the opportunity to co-create games and activities to be used with the cards, to enable these age groups and others to develop their learning as well as discussion on the topic of online fairness.  These discussions culminated in the formation of a ‘Facilitator Booklet’ that contained a selection of the games that participants created as well as further information and advice for facilitators, to enable them to run their own sessions using the cards.

The booklet is freely available online to download.  We also have a small amount of hard copies of the booklet and are in the process of forming a strategy for wider dissemination of the booklet.

Related to the Fairness Toolkit, we have undertaken other dissemination work to promote the outputs of the UnBias project:

• Liz Dowthwaite and Elvira Perez Vallejos together with their colleagues on the UnBias project at the University of Oxford, ran a workshop at Change Forum in association with Fluxx and News UK to put into practice the UnBias Awareness cards with stakeholders from the media industry, and to reflect on algorithm intentions and values.
• Helen Creswick and Liz attended the Festival of Science and Curiosity to introduce member of the public to the UnBias Awareness Cards and to run interactive games and activities with them.
• Ansgar Koene presented an “Education” session on Algorithmic Literacy at EuroDIG2019 leading participants through the use of the UnBias Awareness Cards with help from a number of example games from the Facilitator Booklet.
• In September Ansgar will use the UnBias Awareness Cards and Facilitator Booklet for another session on Algorithmic Literacy, at the MyData conference in Helsinki, Finland.

EPSRC Telling Tales of Engagement

Led by Ansgar Koene, this project is a collaboration with Prof. Matthew Daniels (Chair of Law and Human Rights at The Institute of World Politics; Founder of Good of All) to provide an evidence base for the use of youth created short YouTube videos in awareness raising about human rights such as online privacy.

We will soon begin data collection by seeking the responses of undergraduate students to find out whether watching a selection of videos that are produced by the Human Rights Network, are effective in making participants more aware of human rights.