Participation of Armend Duzha at the ARES Conference 2022

/in /by

Armend Duzha participated at the 2nd International Workshop on Advances on Privacy Preserving Technologies and Solutions (IWAPS 2022) and the 6th International Workshop on Security and Forensics of IoT (IoT-SECFOR 2022), both held in conjuction with the 17th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES Conference 2022).

Click here for the IWAPS workshop description

Click here for the IoT-SECFOR workshop description

 

ACM FAccT Conference & Doctoral colloquim

/in , /by

The fifth annual ACM FAccT conference brought together individuals interested in fairness, accountability, and transparency in socio-technical systems. It was held in-person in Seoul, South Korea and online from June 21-24 2022.

Both ESR Xengie Doan attended the conference in person, along with Marietjie Botes from the University of Luxembourg who presented a paper. Xengie applied and was selected to attend the doctoral colloquium.

The doctoral consortium took place in the morning of the 21st. Professor Seth Lazar, with a philosophy background, and Professor Michael L. Littman, with a Computer Science background, began with a conversation about interdisciplinary research. Then, Professor Lazar gave a short introduction of his paper, “Legitimacy, Authority, and the Political Value of Explanations” and ended with valuable insights he learned from doing interdisciplinary research: 1) Don’t focusing too much on trying to have one uber definition to rule them all; 2) beware of false friends in two fields that have fundamental differences. Then the session opened to a Q&A session. Some relevant questions were asked about how to legitimize interdisciplinary research, how to find opportunities, and the mindset to approach research.

After that, the participants had lunch roundtables with mentors, all of whom were distinguished figures in their field. Some were renown professors, some had just spoken on a panel earlier in the day, or some had just found out they won a Distinguished Paper Award at the conference. The mentors were all incredibly kind and willing to give their lunchtime to speak with students.

Following a mentor roundtable, students were put into peer roundtables generally based on topics. Due to my research involving health data, I was put into a group with other PhD students working on health data. There were students in law, AI, and more. We ended up sharing out thesis topics and common issues we were dealing with, such as the opaqueness of ML decisions, the complexity of health data, the overhyping of AI for marketing, and more.

Overall, the FAccT doctoral consortium was a valuable experience that allowed me to meet individuals working on many different fields. It helped me become more knowledgeable and confident working on an interdisciplinary thesis with elements of computer science, privacy, health, and Human Computer Interaction.

AI & Society 2022 Summer School in Pisa

/in , /by

From the 4th to the 8th of July 2022, the first edition of the “AI & Society Summer School”, organized by the Italian National Ph.D. program in Artificial Intelligence, PhD-AI.it, took place at the University of Pisa. The summer school consisted of lectures, panels, poster sessions, and project works. The aim was to advance the frontier of AI research with internationally renowned scientists and build a community for the next generation of AI researchers, innovators, and professionals. All ESRs, Tommaso Crepax, Mitisha Gaur, Robert Lee Poe, Qifan Yang, Maciej Krzysztof Zuziak in the Pisa group of LeADS participated in this summer school.

The welcome lectures were given by Prof. Dino Pedreschi, Prof. Marco Conti and Prof. Vincenzo Ambriola. After that, Prof. Alessio Malizia gave his lecture, “MiniCoDe – Minimise algorithmic bias in Collaborative Decision Making with Design”, and interacted with the participants on how to address bias in algorithms. After an hour-long poster session in the afternoon, Prof. Anna Monreale hosted a panel on “The Future of AI Research” with five women scientists – namely Prof. Francesca Chiaromonte, Prof. Rita Cucchiara, Prof. Fosca Giannotti, Prof. Michela Milano, Prof. Sara Tonelli – in different areas. The following lectures of the summer school covered social artificial intelligence, developmental robots for language learning, trust and theory of mind, human face recognition, deep learning theory, interdisciplinarity of data science and AI, etc.

During the poster session, ESRs showed great poster presentations and introduced their works on “interplay between privacy protection and market competition in the digital revolution (Yang Qifan)”, “differential privacy and differential explainability in the data sphere” by Mitisha, “unchaining data portability potentials in a lawful digital economy” by Tommaso Crepax, “the distinction between fairness and bias by Robert Lee Poe, and “use of distributed personal data management for personalization of digital services by Maciej Krzysztof Zuziak. All ESRs had active discussions with the participating scholars.

On the last day, ESRs presented their project works from their groups, involving “reducing polarization in social media through diffusion models” by Qifan Yang, “polarization detection via the semantic network” by Mitisha Gaur, “a smart mobility platform to improve urban air quality” by Tommaso Crepax, “a multi-way explainable interface for high-risk public use applications by Robert Lee Poe and “continual active learning for healthcare” by Maciej Krzysztof Zuziak. The proposals from Tommaso’s group and Mitisha’s group won second and third prizes.

 

Call for Papers – Digital Ethics: Insights into How Technology Shapes Us And the World We Live In

/in /by

Humanities & Social Sciences Communications is a fully open-access, online journal publishing peer-reviewed research from across—and between—all areas of the humanities, behavioural and social sciences. The journal is strongly committed to upholding the highest editorial and ethical standards and providing our authors and readers with a responsive and efficient service. Dr. Marietjie Botes, one of LeADS collaborators, is the Co-Guest Editor of a special edition, entitled ‘Digital ethics: Insights into how technology shapes us and the world we live in’ to be published in the academic journal Humanities & Social Sciences Communications published by Springer Nature.

Open access policy

The journal levies an article processing charge (APC)on papers accepted for publication. Authors who lack funding to cover open access publication from either their funder or institution should contact the journal (hsscomms@springernature.com) prior to submission to discuss options.

Call for papers

This topical collection invites contributions from across disciplinary and geographical boundaries that confront the plethora of ethical dilemmas that digital technologies bring. The deadline for submissions is March 2023, for more information check the journal website.