Research Papers

Algorithmic fairness research comes almost entirely out of North America and Western Europe, so we know little about how people elsewhere judge the algorithms they already rely on every day. We asked people in Bangladesh directly: a bilingual (Bangla and English) survey of 199 participants rated fairness across three everyday scenarios -- ride-sharing prices that shift with context, AI beauty filters that reshape appearance, and large language models that handle cultural values differently than a human would. Four patterns stood out. Context changes the verdict even when the outcome doesn't: a 20% price surge during a medical emergency feels less fair than the identical surge on a casual trip (2.00 vs. 2.17 on a 5-point scale, Wilcoxon p = .006), a small effect uneven across income groups (largest among middle-income participants). People already view surge pricing critically in general; context sharpens the judgment rather than creating it. Demand for transparency, consent, and real user control is close to universal: 85.7% to 90.3% of participants want these protections regardless of gender, income, or prior awareness of algorithmic bias. Beauty-filter harm tracks with self-image more than with social pressure people can easily name; feeling personally affected predicts reduced self-confidence tightly (R^2 = .30, p < .001), though the scale's direction is inferred from context rather than guaranteed by labeled anchors. And among participants who noticed specific instances of LLM cultural bias, many could not say why when asked to elaborate -- recognizing bias and being able to articulate it are different skills. Outcome-only fairness metrics would miss every one of these patterns.

As AI systems increasingly mediate decisions in domains such as credit scoring and financial forecasting, their lack of transparency and bias raises critical concerns for fairness and public trust. Existing explainable AI (XAI) approaches largely serve developers, focusing on model justification rather than the needs of affected users or regulators. We introduce Holistic eXplainable AI (H-XAI), a framework that integrates causality-based rating methods with post-hoc explanation techniques to support transparent, stakeholder-aligned evaluation of AI systems deployed in online decision contexts. H-XAI treats explanation as an interactive, hypothesis-driven process, allowing users, auditors, and organizations to ask questions, test hypotheses, and compare model behavior against automatically generated random and biased baselines. By combining global and instance-level explanations, H-XAI helps communicate model bias and instability that shape everyday digital decisions. Through case studies in credit risk assessment and stock price prediction, we show how H-XAI extends explainability beyond developers toward responsible and inclusive AI practices that strengthen accountability in sociotechnical systems.

Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and Claude, have emerged as essential tools for information retrieval, often serving as alternatives to traditional search engines. However, ensuring that these models provide accurate and equitable information tailored to diverse demographic groups remains an important challenge. This study investigates the capability of LLMs to retrieve disaggregated health-related information for sub-ethnic groups within the Asian American population, such as Korean and Chinese communities. Data disaggregation has been a critical practice in health research to address inequities, making it an ideal domain for evaluating representation equity in LLM outputs. We apply a suite of statistical and machine learning tools to assess whether LLMs deliver appropriately disaggregated and equitable information. By focusing on Asian American sub-ethnic groups, a highly diverse population often aggregated in traditional analyses; we highlight how LLMs handle complex disparities in health data. Our findings contribute to ongoing discussions about responsible AI, particularly in ensuring data equity in the outputs of LLM-based systems.

The development of Open-Source Software (OSS) is not only a technical challenge, but also a social one due to the diverse mixture of contributors. To this aim, social-coding platforms, such as GitHub, provide the infrastructure needed to host and develop the code, but also the support for enabling the community's collaboration, which is driven by non-coding contributions, such as issues (i.e., change proposals or bug reports) or comments to existing contributions. As with any other social endeavor, this development process faces ethical challenges, which may put at risk the project's sustainability. To foster a productive and positive environment, OSS projects are increasingly deploying codes of conduct, which define rules to ensure a respectful and inclusive participatory environment, with the Contributor Covenant being the main model to follow. However, monitoring and enforcing these codes of conduct is a challenging task, due to the limitations of current approaches. In this paper, we propose an approach to classify the ethical quality of non-coding contributions in OSS projects by relying on Large Language Models (LLM), a promising technology for text classification tasks. We defined a set of ethical metrics based on the Contributor Covenant and developed a classification approach to assess ethical behavior in OSS non-coding contributions, using prompt engineering to guide the model's output.

In this work, we study the problem pertaining to personalized classification of subclinical atherosclerosis by developing a hierarchical graph neural network framework to leverage two characteristic modalities of a patient: clinical features within the context of the cohort, and molecular data unique to individual patients. Current graph-based methods for disease classification detect patient-specific molecular fingerprints, but lack consistency and comprehension regarding cohort-wide features, which are an essential requirement for understanding pathogenic phenotypes across diverse atherosclerotic trajectories. Furthermore, understanding patient subtypes often considers clinical feature similarity in isolation, without integration of shared pathogenic interdependencies among patients. To address these challenges, we introduce ATHENA: Atherosclerosis Through Hierarchical Explainable Neural Network Analysis, which constructs a novel hierarchical network representation through integrated modality learning; subsequently, it optimizes learned patient-specific molecular fingerprints that reflect individual omics data, enforcing consistency with cohort-wide patterns. With a primary clinical dataset of 391 patients, we demonstrate that this heterogeneous alignment of clinical features with molecular interaction patterns has significantly boosted subclinical atherosclerosis classification performance across various baselines by up to 13% in area under the receiver operating curve (AUC) and 20% in F1 score. Taken together, ATHENA enables mechanistically-informed patient subtype discovery through explainable AI (XAI)-driven subnetwork clustering; this novel integration framework strengthens personalized intervention strategies, thereby improving the prediction of atherosclerotic disease progression and management of their clinical actionable outcomes.

Ask before you Build: Rethinking AI-for-Good in Human Trafficking Interventions

Pratheeksha Nair, Gabriel Lefebvre, Sophia Garrel +2

AI for good initiatives often rely on the assumption that technical interventions can resolve complex social problems. In the context of human trafficking (HT), such techno-solutionism risks oversimplifying exploitation, reinforcing power imbalances and causing harm to the very communities AI claims to support. In this paper, we introduce the Radical Questioning (RQ) framework as a five step, pre-project ethical assessment tool to critically evaluate whether AI should be built at all, especially in domains involving marginalized populations and entrenched systemic injustice. RQ does not replace principles based ethics but precedes it, offering an upstream, deliberative space to confront assumptions, map power, and consider harms before design. Using a case study in AI for HT, we demonstrate how RQ reveals overlooked sociocultural complexities and guides us away from surveillance based interventions toward survivor empowerment tools. While developed in the context of HT, RQ's five step structure can generalize to other domains, though the specific questions must be contextual. This paper situates RQ within a broader AI ethics philosophy that challenges instrumentalist norms and centers relational, reflexive responsibility.

This position paper situates AR beauty filters within the broader debate on Body Politics in HCI. We argue that these filters are not neutral tools but technologies of governance that reinforce racialized, gendered, and ableist beauty standards. Through naming conventions, algorithmic bias, and platform governance, they impose aesthetic norms while concealing their influence. To address these challenges, we advocate for transparency-driven interventions and a critical rethinking of algorithmic aesthetics and digital embodiment.

Ensuring responsible use of artificial intelligence (AI) has become imperative as autonomous systems increasingly influence critical societal domains. However, the concept of trustworthy AI remains broad and multi-faceted. This thesis advances knowledge in the safety, fairness, transparency, and accountability of AI systems. In safety, we extend classical deterministic shielding techniques to become resilient against delayed observations, enabling practical deployment in real-world conditions. We also implement both deterministic and probabilistic safety shields into simulated autonomous vehicles to prevent collisions with road users, validating the use of these techniques in realistic driving simulators. We introduce fairness shields, a novel post-processing approach to enforce group fairness in sequential decision-making settings over finite and periodic time horizons. By optimizing intervention costs while strictly ensuring fairness constraints, this method efficiently balances fairness with minimal interference. For transparency and accountability, we propose a formal framework for assessing intentional behaviour in probabilistic decision-making agents, introducing quantitative metrics of agency and intention quotient. We use these metrics to propose a retrospective analysis of intention, useful for determining responsibility when autonomous systems cause unintended harm. Finally, we unify these contributions through the ``reactive decision-making'' framework, providing a general formalization that consolidates previous approaches. Collectively, the advancements presented contribute practically to the realization of safer, fairer, and more accountable AI systems, laying the foundations for future research in trustworthy AI.

AI-driven automation generates broad-based social benefit only if technical gains become visible, durable, and publicly claimable. We develop a policy-facing stress test by extending a standard task-automation growth model with an AI capability parameter that raises productivity on automatable tasks while holding the set of tasks fixed. The exercise is intentionally limited: it is not a forecast of AI timelines or a full welfare analysis, but a way to identify which institutions determine whether AI rents can support broad transfers. Calibrated to U.S. quantities, the model shows that capability alone is not decisive. Public capture, deployment costs, automation scope, and market structure jointly determine when AI gains become shareable. The main policy lesson is that moving from low to moderate public capture (33\%) can substitute for substantial AI capability growth, while pushing capture further to full nationalization yields smaller gains, especially if deployment or safety costs are high. Competition policy also has distributional consequences: opening concentrated AI markets may improve fairness and resilience, but can reduce the rent pool unless alternative public-claim institutions are built. Cross-nationally, tax-heavy systems lower the needed AI capability threshold through stronger effective revenue collection, while Singaporean and Abu Dhabi-style public-asset models show that governments can also capture AI gains through ownership and investment returns rather than taxes alone. Our framework therefore identifies which levers governments can act on now to make future AI gains easier to measure, claim, and distribute broadly.

Contemporary discussions in AI ethics often treat culture as a source of normative divergence that needs to be accommodated, tolerated, or managed due to its resistance to universal standards. This paper offers an alternative vision through the concept of "Cultural Co-Genesis of AI Ethics." Rather than viewing culture as a boundary or container of isolated moral systems, we argue that it is a generative space for ethical co-production. In this framework, ethical values emerge through intercultural engagement, dialogical encounters, mutual recognition, and shared moral inquiry. This approach resists both universalist imposition and relativistic fragmentation. Cultures are not approached as absolutes to be defended or dissolved, but as co-authors of a dynamic ethical landscape. By grounding AI ethics in Cultural Co-Genesis, we move from managing difference to constructing shared ethical meaning for AI ethics, with culture as a partner, not a problem. We support this framework with two cases: (1) a theoretical analysis of how various cultures interpret the emergence of powerful new species, challenging dominant existential risk narratives, and (2) an empirical study of global AI ethics principles using data from the Linking AI Principles project, which reveals deep ethical convergence despite cultural diversity. We conclude that cross-cultural AI ethics should be seen not as an ethical patchwork, but as a mosaic in progress, woven from the normative insights that emerge between cultures.

As machine learning is increasingly applied in an online fashion to deal with evolving data streams, the fairness of these algorithms is a matter of growing ethical and legal concern. In many use cases, class imbalance in the data also needs to be dealt with to ensure predictive performance. Current fairness-aware stream learners typically attempt to solve these issues through in- or post-processing by focusing on optimizing one specific discrimination metric, addressing class imbalance in a separate processing step. While C-SMOTE is a highly effective model-agnostic pre-processing approach to mitigate class imbalance, as a side effect of this method, algorithmic bias is often introduced. Therefore, we propose CFSMOTE - a fairness-aware, continuous SMOTE variant - as a pre-processing approach to simultaneously address the class imbalance and fairness concerns by employing situation testing and balancing fairness-relevant groups during oversampling. Unlike other fairness-aware stream learners, CFSMOTE is not optimizing for only one specific fairness metric, therefore avoiding potentially problematic trade-offs. Our experiments show significant improvement on several common group fairness metrics in comparison to vanilla C-SMOTE while maintaining competitive performance, also in comparison to other fairness-aware algorithms.

Fair Play for Individuals, Foul Play for Groups? Auditing Anonymization's Impact on ML Fairness

Héber H. Arcolezi, Mina Alishahi, Adda-Akram Bendoukha +1

Machine learning (ML) algorithms are heavily based on the availability of training data, which, depending on the domain, often includes sensitive information about data providers. This raises critical privacy concerns. Anonymization techniques have emerged as a practical solution to address these issues by generalizing features or suppressing data to make it more difficult to accurately identify individuals. Although recent studies have shown that privacy-enhancing technologies can influence ML predictions across different subgroups, thus affecting fair decision-making, the specific effects of anonymization techniques, such as $k$-anonymity, $\ell$-diversity, and $t$-closeness, on ML fairness remain largely unexplored. In this work, we systematically audit the impact of anonymization techniques on ML fairness, evaluating both individual and group fairness. Our quantitative study reveals that anonymization can degrade group fairness metrics by up to fourfold. Conversely, similarity-based individual fairness metrics tend to improve under stronger anonymization, largely as a result of increased input homogeneity. By analyzing varying levels of anonymization across diverse privacy settings and data distributions, this study provides critical insights into the trade-offs between privacy, fairness, and utility, offering actionable guidelines for responsible AI development. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/hharcolezi/anonymity-impact-fairness.