Related papers: "This is not a data problem": Algorithms and Power…
Agentic systems, in which diverse agents cooperate to tackle challenging problems, are exploding in popularity in the AI community. However, existing agentic frameworks take a relatively narrow view of agents, apply a centralized model, and…
A growing number of oversight boards and regulatory bodies seek to monitor and govern algorithms that make decisions about people's lives. Prior work has explored how people believe algorithmic decisions should be made, but there is little…
The research area of algorithms with predictions has seen recent success showing how to incorporate machine learning into algorithm design to improve performance when the predictions are correct, while retaining worst-case guarantees when…
We consider the problem of designing affirmative action policies for selecting the top-k candidates from a pool of applicants. We assume that for each candidate we have socio-demographic attributes and a series of variables that serve as…
Technological progress has led to powerful computers and communication technologies that penetrate nowadays all areas of science, industry and our private lives. As a consequence, all these areas are generating digital traces of data…
It is known that reinforcement learning (RL) is data-hungry. To improve sample-efficiency of RL, it has been proposed that the learning algorithm utilize data from 'approximately similar' processes. However, since the process models are…
In an attempt to make algorithms fair, the machine learning literature has largely focused on equalizing decisions, outcomes, or error rates across race or gender groups. To illustrate, consider a hypothetical government rideshare program…
Randomized A/B comparisons of alternative pedagogical strategies or other course improvements could provide useful empirical evidence for instructor decision-making. However, traditional experiments do not provide a straightforward pathway…
Increasingly, modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) research has become more computationally intensive. However, a growing concern is that due to unequal access to computing power, only certain firms and elite universities have advantages in…
Many key problems in machine learning and data science are routinely modeled as optimization problems and solved via optimization algorithms. With the increase of the volume of data and the size and complexity of the statistical models used…
Societies often rely on human experts to take a wide variety of decisions affecting their members, from jail-or-release decisions taken by judges and stop-and-frisk decisions taken by police officers to accept-or-reject decisions taken by…
Model multiplicity, the phenomenon where multiple models achieve similar performance despite different underlying learned functions, introduces arbitrariness in model selection. While this arbitrariness may seem inconsequential in…
Risk assessment algorithms in criminal justice put people's lives at the discretion of a simple statistical tool. This thesis explores how algorithmic decision-making in criminal policy can exhibit feedback effects, where disadvantage…
The parallel and distributed processing are becoming de facto industry standard, and a large part of the current research is targeted on how to make computing scalable and distributed, dynamically, without allocating the resources on…
Applications of machine learning (ML) to high-stakes policy settings -- such as education, criminal justice, healthcare, and social service delivery -- have grown rapidly in recent years, sparking important conversations about how to ensure…
The ethical consequences of, constraints upon and regulation of algorithms arguably represent the defining challenges of our age, asking us to reckon with the rise of computational technologies whose potential to radically transforming…
Research institutions provide the infrastructure for scientific discovery, yet their role in the production of knowledge is not well characterized. To address this gap, we analyze interactions of researchers within and between institutions…
Peer grading is the process of students reviewing each others' work, such as homework submissions, and has lately become a popular mechanism used in massive open online courses (MOOCs). Intrigued by this idea, we used it in a course on…
Academic policy engagement, the structured processes through which researchers contribute evidence and expertise to public decision-making, is shaped not only by research quality but by the accessibility of engagement opportunities. In…
As artificial intelligence (AI) grows in popularity and importance-both as a domain within broader computing research and in society at large-increasing focus will need to be paid to the ethical governance of this emerging technology. The…