DASS: Legally & Locally Legitimate: Designing & Evaluating Software Systems to Advance Equal Opportunity

学区努力增加平等的教育机会，避免学生受到种族孤立。许多学区使用学校分配软件系统来推进这些目标；如今，全美已有100多个学区采用了学校分配软件系统。其中一些制度受到了法律挑战，无论是成功的还是失败的，都是对学区用来促进平等机会的方法的挑战。这项研究审查了如何最好地确保这些软件系统的设计符合法律和经济限制以及社区民主参与，以确保社区眼中的合法合规和合法性。改进这些软件系统将影响数十万学生接受教育的机会。最后，这项工作将有助于迅速增长的关于与软件系统和人工智能相关的股权挑战的学术研究，这与越来越多的关于软件决策的立法提案有关。越来越多的组织看到了推进其政策目标的希望，如机会均等，使用能够在教育、就业、住房、投票权等背景下客观地实施预定义程序的软件系统。这些软件系统必须遵守复杂和模棱两可的要求，它们的成功在一定程度上取决于它们在政策制定者、用户和当局眼中所做决定的合法性。然而，如果没有明确的合规标准，法律规则往往是模棱两可的。此外，当不存在公平的外部衡量标准时，人们如何感知一个决定是否公正？这个项目依赖于法律和社会领域的两个理论--法律内生性理论和程序正义理论--来研究如何积极地让用户和政策制定者参与到责任软件系统的机制设计中来。它遵循一种可推广的五步法来设计合法和本地合法的(L3)软件系统。研究小组将在与旧金山联合学区合作的背景下研究和开发该方法，在那里它将帮助该学区的学生分配软件系统的重新设计。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

School districts struggle to increase equal educational opportunity and avoid racial isolation for their students. Many districts use a school-assignment software system to further these goals; today, more than 100 school districts across the United States have adopted school-assignment software systems. Some of these systems have been subject to legal challenges, both successful and unsuccessful, to the approach the school districts used to advance equal opportunity. This study examines how best to ensure that these software systems are designed to respond to legal and economic constraints and democratic community participation in order to ensure both legal compliance and legitimacy in the eyes of the community. Improving these software systems will affect hundreds of thousands of students’ access to education. Finally, this work will contribute to the rapidly growing scholarship on equity challenges associated with software systems and artificial intelligence, which is tied to a growing number of legislative proposals regarding decisions made by software. Organizations increasingly see promise in advancing their policy goals, such as equal opportunity, using software systems that can implement pre-defined procedures objectively, in contexts such as education, employment, housing, voting rights, etc. These software systems must comply with complex and ambiguous requirements, and their success relies in part on the legitimacy of the decisions that they make in the eyes of policy makers, users, and authorities. Legal rules, however, are often ambiguous without clear criteria for compliance. Additionally, when no outside metric of fairness exists, how do people perceive whether a decision is just? This project relies on two theories in the field of law and society -- legal endogeneity theory and procedural justice theory -– to study how to actively involve users and policy makers in designing mechanisms for accountable software systems. It pursues a generalizable five-step method to design Legal and Locally Legitimate (L3) software systems. The research team will study and develop the method in the context of a partnership with the San Francisco Unified School District, where it will assist in the redesign of that district's student-assignment software system.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.