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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.
Anupam Datta is an Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University where he
holds a joint appointment in the Computer Science and Electrical and Computer
Engineering Departments. His research focuses on the scientific foundations of
security and privacy. Datta's work has led to new principles for securely
composing cryptographic protocols and software systems; applications of these
principles have influenced several IEEE and IETF standards. His work on privacy
protection has led to formalizations of privacy as contextual integrity and
purpose restrictions on information use; accountability mechanisms for privacy
protection; and their applications in healthcare and Web privacy. Datta has
authored a book and over 40 other publications on these topics. He serves on
the Steering Committee and as the 2013-14 Program Co-Chair of the IEEE Computer
Security Foundations Symposium. Datta obtained Ph.D. (2005) and M.S. (2002)
degrees from Stanford University and a B.Tech. (2000) from IIT Kharagpur, all
in Computer Science.
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SaTC: CORE: Large: Collaborative: Accountable Information Use: Privacy and Fairness in Decision-Making Systems