FORC 2021: Program

FORC 2021 was held virtually (on Gather.town) June 9-11, 2021.

Times below are US East Coast time (EDT).

Day 1: Wednesday, June 9, 2021

12pm-1pm EDT (Plenary Room) Opening remarks and Keynote: A Conversation with Julie Owono, Executive Director of Internet Without Borders, and Inaugural Board Member of the Facebook Oversight Board. (Session chair: Omer Reingold) [recording]

1pm-2:30pm EDT Session 1 (Session chair: Salil Vadhan)

  • 1pm-1:30pm (Plenary Room) 5-minute paper talks:
    1. Alisa Chang, Badih Ghazi, Ravi Kumar and Pasin Manurangsi. Locally Private k-Means in One Round. [paper] [20-minute talk] [5-minute talk]
    2. Wanrong Zhang, Gautam Kamath and Rachel Cummings. PAPRIKA: Private Online False Discovery Rate Control. [paper] [20-minute talk] [5-minute talk]
    3. Arun Ganesh and Jiazheng Zhao. Privately Answering Counting Queries with Generalized Gaussian Mechanisms. [paper] [20-minute talk] [5-minute talk]
    4. Vitaly Feldman and Tijana Zrnic. Individual Privacy Accounting via a Rényi Filter. [paper] [20-minute talk] [5-minute talk]
  • 1:30pm-2pm (Plenary Room) Panel discussion featuring session authors: What technical advances does DP research need to best contribute to responsible computing?
  • 2pm-2:30pm (Lobby) Poster session

2:30pm-4pm EDT Session 2 (Session chair: Adam Smith)

  • 2:30pm-3pm (Plenary Room) 5-minute paper talks
    1. Wanrong Zhang, Olga Ohrimenko and Rachel Cummings. Attribute Privacy: Framework and Mechanisms. [paper] [20-minute talk] [5-minute talk]
    2. Badih Ghazi, Ravi Kumar, Pasin Manurangsi, Rasmus Pagh and Amer Sinha. Differentially Private Aggregation in the Shuffle Model: Almost Central Accuracy in Almost a Single Message. [paper] [20-minute talk] [5-minute talk]
    3. Aloni Cohen, Moon Duchin, Jn Matthews and Bhushan Suwal. Census TopDown: Investigating the Impacts of Differential Privacy on Redistricting. [paper] [20-minute talk] [5-minute talk]
    4. Enayat Ullah, Tung Mai, Anup Rao, Ryan Rossi and Raman Arora. Machine unlearning via algorithmic stability. [paper] [20-minute talk] [5-minute talk]
  • 3pm-3:30pm (Plenary Room) Panel discussion featuring session authors: What else is “privacy”?
  • 3:30pm-4pm (Lobby) Poster session

4pm-5pm EDT (Lobby) Social hour

Day 2: Thursday, June 10, 2021

12pm-1pm EDT (Lobby) Social hour

1pm-2:30pm EDT Session 1: (Session chair: Swati Gupta)

  • 1pm-1:30pm (Plenary Room) 5-minute paper talks
    1. Christopher Jung, Michael Kearns, Seth Neel, Aaron Roth, Logan Stapleton and Z. Steven Wu. An Algorithmic Framework for Fairness Elicitation. [paper] [20-minute talk] [5-minute talk]
    2. Yahav Bechavod, Christopher Jung and Zhiwei Steven Wu. Metric-Free Individual Fairness in Online Learning. [paper] [20-minute talk] [5-minute talk]
    3. Shuchi Chawla and Meena Jagadeesan. Individual Fairness in Advertising Auctions through Inverse Proportionality. [paper] [20-minute talk] [5-minute talk]
    4. Emily Diana, Wesley Gill, Aaron Roth, Michael Kearns, Ira Globus-Harris and Saeed Sharifi-Malvajerdi. Lexicographically Fair Learning: Algorithms and Generalization. [paper] [20-minute talk] [5-minute talk]
  • 1:30pm-2pm (Plenary Room) Panel discussion featuring session authors: Translation of fair learning to practice.
  • 2pm-2:30pm (Lobby) Poster session

2:30pm-4pm EDT Session 2 (Session chair: Elisa Celis)

4pm-5pm EDT (Plenary Room) Keynote: Kate Crawford. Atlas of AI: Mapping the social and economic forces behind AI. (Interlocutor: Cynthia Dwork) [recording]

Day 3: Friday, June 11, 2021

12pm-1pm EDT (Lobby) Mentoring meetup: Student and postdocs are invited to join impromptu conversations with senior members of the FORC community.

1pm-2:30pm EDT Session 1 (Session chair: Kobbi Nissim)

  • 1pm-1:30pm (Plenary Room) 5-minute paper talks
    1. Cynthia Dwork, Michael P. Kim, Omer Reingold, Guy Rothblum and Gal Yona. Outcome Indistinguishability. [paper] [20-minute talk] [5-minute talk]
    2. Kate Donahue and Solon Barocas. Better Together? How Externalities of Size Complicate Notions of Solidarity and Actuarial Fairness. [paper] [20-minute talk] [5-minute talk]
    3. Christopher Jung, Changhwa Lee, Mallesh Pai, Aaron Roth and Rakesh Vohra. Moment Multicalibration for Uncertainty Estimation. [paper] [20-minute talk] [5-minute talk]
    4. Claire Lazar Reich and Suhas Vijaykumar. A Possibility in Algorithmic Fairness: Can Calibration and Equal Error Rates be Reconciled? [paper] [20-minute talk] [5-minute talk]
  • 1:30pm-2pm (Plenary Room) Panel discussion featuring session authors: How do technical notions acquire a moral component?
  • 2pm-2:30pm (Lobby) Poster session

2:30pm-4pm EDT Session 2 (Session chair: Scott Kominers)

  • 2:30pm-3pm (Plenary Room) 5-minute paper talks
    1. Cyrus Hettle, Shixiang Zhu, Swati Gupta and Yao Xie. Balanced Districting on Grid Graphs with Provable Compactness and Contiguity. [paper] [20-minute talk] [5-minute talk]
    2. Vincent Cohen-Addad, Philip Klein, Dániel Marx, Archer Wheeler and Christopher Wolfram. On the computational tractability of a geographic clustering problem arising in redistricting. [paper] [20-minute talk] [5-minute talk]
    3. Ke Yang, Joshua Loftus and Julia Stoyanovich. Causal Intersectionality and Fair Ranking. [paper] [20-minute talk] [5-minute talk]
    4. Vahideh Manshadi, Rad Niazadeh and Scott Rodilitz. Fair Dynamic Rationing. [paper] [20-minute talk] [5-minute talk]
  • 3pm-3:30pm (Plenary Room) Panel discussion featuring session authors: The role of a computational perspective in reducing inequality.
  • 3:30pm-4pm (Lobby) Poster session

4pm-5pm EDT (Lobby) Social hour

Julie Owono, moderated by Omer Reingold

Title TBA

Abstract: TBA

Bio: Julie Owono is the Executive Director of Internet Sans Frontières (Internet Without Borders), a leading organization that defends digital rights and access to the internet, and one of the inaugural members of the Facebook Oversight Board. At the intersection of Business and Human Rights, her work focuses on creating channels of collaboration between different set of actors of the Internet. Particularly, as a practitioner Fellow at the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University, and as an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, she is working on a policy and technical solution to bring local knowledge and context to algorithmic content moderation on social media platforms. Julie is a member of the Global Partnership on AI (AI) created by France and Canada, of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on AI for Humanity, of the WEF Council on the Connected World. She was also a member of UNESCO’s Ad Hoc Expert Group (AHEG) for the Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, a Member of the World Benchmarking Alliance’s Expert Committee on Digital Inclusion, and a Civil Society member of the Global Network Initiative’s Board. Julie graduated in International Law from La Sorbonne University in Paris, and practiced as a lawyer at the Paris Bar. 

Kate Crawford, in conversation with Cynthia Dwork

Atlas of AI: Mapping the social and economic forces behind AI

Abstract: Machine learning systems are already playing a significant role in many of our social institutions, including healthcare, education, hiring and criminal justice. But despite the patina of objectivity and neutrality, many scholars have shown how these systems can reproduce and intensify forms of structural bias and discrimination. Join Professors Cynthia Dwork and Kate Crawford as they discuss insights from Dr. Crawford’s new book Atlas of AI to show the historical origins, labor practices, infrastructures, and epistemological assumptions that underlie the production of artificial intelligence. The classificatory logics and predictive approaches raise challenges that extend well beyond the current bias debate. By focusing on the role of data in creating “ground truth”, we see the ethical and political consequences of how AI systems are currently trained. Crawford and Dwork will discuss new paths for thinking through  research ethics, scientific practice, and policy implications.

Bio: Kate Crawford is a leading scholar of the social implications of artificial intelligence. Her work focuses on understanding large-scale data systems in the wider contexts of history, politics, labor, and the environment. She is a Research Professor at USC Annenberg, a Senior Principal Researcher at MSR-NYC, and she currently holds the inaugural Visiting Chair for AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Kate’s work also includes collaborative projects and visual investigations. Her project Anatomy of an AI System with Vladan Joler won the Beazley Design of the Year Award, and is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her collaboration with the artist Trevor Paglen produced Training Humans – the first major exhibition of the images used to train AI systems. Their investigative essay, Excavating AI, won the Ayrton Prize from the British Society for the History of Science. Crawford’s latest book, Atlas of AI, was published by Yale University Press this month, and has been described as “timely and urgent” by Science.

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