Presentation by distinguished speaker Prof. Krishna Gummadi

We will be hosting a distinguished guest, Prof. Krishna Gummadi (Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Germany).

• Time: Tuesday, February 7, 2023, 5:00-6:00 pm CET
• Location: ECHO - Arena auditorium

Foundations for Fair Social Computing

We are witnessing human-computer symbiosis at societal scale. By societal-scale symbiosis, we refer to human interactions via and with computing technologies, where humans actively provide inputs to influence computations and where computational outcomes shape individual lives and social groups. Even as computing systems are designed by humans, there are growing concerns that today’s systems fail to ensure their users’ well-being and societal welfare, disregard laws and social norms, and cannot be held to account for non-compliance with governmental regulations and stakeholder agreements. If these concerns are left unaddressed, the next generation of computing systems will be designed around the wants of a few rather than the welfare of the many and the systems may impact our individual and social lives in ways that are unpredictable, unintended or even undesired. In this talk, I will discuss some of our attempts to tackle the challenges with operationalising and mitigating bias and unfairness in today's Internet-scale socio-technical systems, while maintaining their innovative potential.
 

Krishna Gummadi is a scientific director at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) in Germany. He also holds a professorship at the University of Saarland. He received his Ph.D. (2005) and B.Tech. (2000) degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington and the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, respectively. Krishna’s current research focus is on understanding and building fair, accountable, transparent, and explainable social computing systems. Krishna's work on fair machine learning, online social networks and media, Internet access networks, and peer-to-peer systems has been widely cited and his publications have received over 10 best/outstanding papers awards, including the Test-of-Time Awards at ACM SIGCOMM and AAAI ICWSM and Privacy Awards at PETS and CNIL-INRIA. He received an ERC Advanced Grant in 2017 to investigate "Foundations for Fair Social Computing".