Collaborative Research: RI: Small: End-to-end Learning of Fair and Explainable Schedules for Court Systems

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The American Court system is a large and complex socio-technical system that handles millions of criminal cases every year. However, the current pretrial scheduling process is plagued by a staggering one in five defendants missing court dates. This imposes high costs on the judiciary as an institution, and can be particularly harmful to defendants who have insecure employment situations, care-giving responsibilities, or lack transportation to court. These disparate impacts have profound negative effects. To address these issues, this project investigates Fair and Explainable Learning to Schedule, a novel approach that tightly integrates machine learning, constrained optimization, and knowledge representation to learn schedules with certifiable fairness guarantees and enable neuro-symbolic reasoning to provide meaningful and refinable explanations. The proposed research will develop new tools to ensure that pretrial scheduling can decrease nonappearance and be fair to all defendants equally and has thus the potential to have significant societal benefits.From a scientific standpoint, this project will develop a new generation of integrated learning and optimization tools as well as explanation tools to realize the potential of fairer and more equitable schedules. The proposed Fair and Explainable Learning to Schedule will make key contributions in several areas, including: (1) enabling deep learning systems to handle combinatorial structures to represent schedules; (2) developing end-to-end training procedures that integrate constrained optimization within a learning pipeline; (3) providing guarantees on the satisfaction of user-specified fairness notions in the learning process; (4) developing neuro-symbolic approaches to provide explanations about scheduling and fairness properties; (5) integrating learning and logic-based reasoning to provide personalized explanations at appropriate abstraction levels to users; and (6) developing new datasets for fair pretrial court scheduling.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.