Related papers: Quantifying Harm

The notion of causal effect is fundamental across many scientific disciplines. Traditionally, quantitative researchers have studied causal effects at the level of variables; for example, how a certain drug dose (W) causally affects a…

The fundamental problem of causal inference -- that we never observe counterfactuals -- prevents us from identifying how many might be negatively affected by a proposed intervention. If, in an A/B test, half of users click (or buy, or…

This proposal highlights the potential real-world consequences of harmful experiences in immersive and embodied spaces due to presence, which moderates experiences, intensifying positive or negative content. While positive experiences…

Large language models produce human-like text that drive a growing number of applications. However, recent literature and, increasingly, real world observations, have demonstrated that these models can generate language that is toxic,…

Due to its general-purpose nature, Generative AI is applied in an ever-growing set of domains and tasks, leading to an expanding set of risks of harm impacting people, communities, society, and the environment. These risks may arise due to…

Understanding the landscape of potential harms from algorithmic systems enables practitioners to better anticipate consequences of the systems they build. It also supports the prospect of incorporating controls to help minimize harms that…

Estimating individualized treatment rules (ITRs) is crucial for tailoring interventions in precision medicine. Typical ITR estimation methods rely on conditional average treatment effects (CATEs) to guide treatment assignments. However,…

Many real-world situations of ethical and economic relevance, such as collective (in)action with respect to the climate crisis, involve not only diverse agents whose decisions interact in complicated ways, but also various forms of…

Text data can pose a risk of harm. However, the risks are not fully understood, and how to handle, present, and discuss harmful text in a safe way remains an unresolved issue in the NLP community. We provide an analytical framework…

How to avoid discrimination in the context of NLP technology is one of the major challenges in the field. We propose that a different and more substantiated framing of the problem could help to find more productive approaches. In the first…

Envy-freeness has become the cornerstone of fair division research. In settings where each individual is allocated a disjoint share of collective resources, it is a compelling fairness axiom which demands that no individual strictly prefer…

Concern has recently been expressed by HCI researchers as to the inappropriate treatment of qualitative studies through a positivistic mode of evaluation that places emphasis on metrics and measurement. This contrasts with the nature of…

Reinforcement learning algorithms are generally designed to maximize the expected return across a population. However, a policy that is optimal on average may be suboptimal for certain individuals, leading to potential safety concerns. To…

Recent years have seen many advances in methods for causal structure learning from data. The empirical assessment of such methods, however, is much less developed. Motivated by this gap, we pose the following question: how can one assess,…

The last few years have seen the proliferation of measures that quantify the scientific output of researches. Yet, these measures focus on productivity, thus fostering the "publish or perish" paradigm. This article proposes a measure that…

Violence risk assessment in psychiatric institutions enables interventions to avoid violence incidents. Clinical notes written by practitioners and available in electronic health records (EHR) are valuable resources that are seldom used to…

After more than two decades of discussion, the concept of cyberterrorism remains plagued by confusion. This article presents the result of an integrative review which maps the development of the term and situates the epistemic communities…

Increasing integration and availability of data on large groups of persons has been accompanied by proliferation of statistical and other algorithmic prediction tools in banking, insurance, marketiNg, medicine, and other FIelds (see e.g.,…

Many policies allocate harms or benefits that are uncertain in nature: they produce distributions over the population in which individuals have different probabilities of incurring harm or benefit. Comparing different policies thus involves…

We describe and contrast two distinct problem areas for statistical causality: studying the likely effects of an intervention ("effects of causes"), and studying whether there is a causal link between the observed exposure and outcome in an…