WeNet’s work at AIES 2021

As previously anticipated, WeNet’s work will be featured on May 19 at this year’s virtual edition of The AAAI/ACM conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and Society (AIES): an important event that brings together Computer Science, Law and Policy, the Social Sciences, and Philosophy researchers to encourage the possibilities for interdisciplinary connections and challenges on AI related topics. 

The paper that will presented (through a dedicated video) “The Theory, Practice, and Ethical Challenges of Designing a Diversity-Aware Platform for Social Relations”, describes a design solution that centers the well-being of users. The accompanying poster, will focus on the paradigm that was developed in WeNet including theory, practice, and ethical challenges of designing a diversity-aware platform for social relations. 

The work is the result of a collective effort gathering input from representatives coming from most of WeNet consortium: Laura Schelenz (Tübingen University), which acted as coordinator), Ivano Bison and Matteo Busso (University of Trento) Amalia de Götzen (Aalborg University), Daniel Gatica-Perez and Lakmal Meegahapola (Idiap Research Institute), Salvador Ruiz-Correa (IPICYT) and Project Coordinator Fausto Giunchiglia (University of Trento).

Here below, the abstract for the paper:

“Diversity-aware platform design is a new paradigm that responds to the ethical challenges of existing social media platforms. Available platforms have been criticized for minimizing users’ autonomy, e.g. marginalizing minorities or exploiting users’ data for profit maximization. This paper presents a design solution that centers the well-being of users. It presents the theory and practice of designing a diversity-aware platform for social relations. In this approach, the diversity of users is leveraged in a way that allows like-minded individuals to pursue similar interests or diverse individuals to complement each other in a complex activity. The end users of the envisioned platform are students, who participate in the design process. Diversity-aware platform design involves numerous steps, of which two are highlighted in this paper: 1) defining a framework and operationalizing the “diversity” of students, 2) collecting “diversity” data to build diversity-aware algorithms. The paper further reflects on the ethical challenges encountered during the design of a diversity-aware platform.”

For more information about the conference and registration: visit the dedicated webpage https://www.aies-conference.com/2021/