MIDAS Seminar Series Presents: Thorsten Joachims – Cornell University

Thorsten Joachims

Professor, Department of Computer Science, Department of Information Science , Cornell University

Fair Ranking with Biased Data

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Search engines and recommender systems have become the dominant matchmaker for a wide range of human endeavors — from online retail to finding romantic partners. Consequently, they carry immense power in shaping markets and allocating opportunity to the participants. In this talk, I will discuss how the machine learning algorithms underlying these systems can produce unfair ranking policies for both exogenous and endogenous reasons. Exogenous reasons often manifest themselves as biases in the training data, which then get reflected in the learned ranking policy and lead to rich-get-richer dynamics. But even when trained with unbiased data, reasons endogenous to the algorithms can lead to unfair or undesirable allocation of opportunity. To overcome these challenges, I will present new machine learning algorithms that directly address both endogenous and exogenous unfairness.

Bio: 

Thorsten Joachims is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University, and he is an Amazon Scholar. His research interests center on a synthesis of theory and system building in machine learning, with applications in information access, language technology, and recommendation. His past research focused on counterfactual and causal inference, support vector machines, text classification, structured output prediction, convex optimization, learning to rank, learning with preferences, and learning from implicit feedback. He is an ACM Fellow, AAAI Fellow, and Humboldt Fellow.

For more information on MIDAS or the Seminar Series, please contact midas-contact@umich.edu.