SaTC: CORE: Large: Collaborative: Accountable Information Use: Privacy and Fairness in Decision-Making Systems

影响人们生活的决策和行动越来越多地由处理个人数据的自动化系统决定。对这些系统的兴奋伴随着对其不透明性的严重担忧，以及它们对隐私、公平和其他价值观构成的威胁。认识到这些问题，调查人员试图使现实世界的自动决策系统能够检测和解释违反这些价值观的行为，从而对隐私和公平负责。技术工作由在线广告、医疗保健和刑事司法提供信息，并应用于这些领域，与领域专家合作并听取他们的建议。解决决策系统中的隐私和公平问题需要提供正式的定义框架和实用的系统设计。调查人员提出了隐私和公平的新概念，既处理受保护的信息本身，也处理其代理，同时处理与上下文相关的违规行为的规范定义。他们解决了一个基本的紧张关系，即系统审计员的访问权限与系统所有者的知识产权保护和系统使用的个人数据的机密性之间的矛盾。调查人员将这种审计分解为几个阶段，在这些阶段中，当检测到潜在的（但无法解释的）侵犯隐私或公平行为时，授予审计员的访问级别就会增加。讲习班和代码和数据的公开发布扩大了调查人员与决策者和其他利益攸关方的互动。他们与外展组织的伙伴关系鼓励多样性。

Increasingly, decisions and actions affecting people's lives are determined by automated systems processing personal data.  Excitement about these systems has been accompanied by serious concerns about their opacity and the threats that they pose to privacy, fairness, and other values.  Recognizing these concerns, the investigators seek to make real-world automated decision-making systems accountable for privacy and fairness by enabling them to detect and explain violations of these values.  The technical work is informed by, and applied to, online advertising, healthcare, and criminal justice, in collaboration with and as advised by domain experts. Addressing privacy and fairness in decision systems requires providing formal definitional frameworks and practical system designs.  The investigators provide new notions of privacy and fairness that deal with both protected information itself and proxies for it, while handling context-dependent, normative definitions of violations.  A fundamental tension they address pits the access given to auditors of a system against the system owners' intellectual property protections and the confidentiality of the personal data used by the system.  The investigators decompose such auditing into stages, where the level of access granted to an auditor is increased when potential (but not explainable) violations of privacy or fairness are detected. Workshops and public releases of code and data amplify the investigators' interactions with policy makers and other stakeholders. Their partnerships with outreach organizations encourage diversity.