Recommender systems are gaining increasing and critical impacts on human and society since a growing number of users use them for information seeking and decision making. Therefore, it is crucial to address the potential unfairness problems in recommendations. Just like users have personalized preferences on items, users' demands for fairness are also personalized in many scenarios. Therefore, it is important to provide personalized fair recommendations for users to satisfy their personalized fairness demands. Besides, previous works on fair recommendation mainly focus on association-based fairness. However, it is important to advance from associative fairness notions to causal fairness notions for assessing fairness more properly in recommender systems. Based on the above considerations, this paper focuses on achieving personalized counterfactual fairness for users in recommender systems. To this end, we introduce a framework for achieving counterfactually fair recommendations through adversary learning by generating feature-independent user embeddings for recommendation. The framework allows recommender systems to achieve personalized fairness for users while also covering non-personalized situations. Experiments on two real-world datasets with shallow and deep recommendation algorithms show that our method can generate fairer recommendations for users with a desirable recommendation performance.

In this work we study the problem of measuring the fairness of a machine learning model under noisy information. Focusing on group fairness metrics, we investigate the particular but common situation when the evaluation requires controlling for the confounding effect of covariate variables. In a practical setting, we might not be able to jointly observe the covariate and group information, and a standard workaround is to then use proxies for one or more of these variables. Prior works have demonstrated the challenges with using a proxy for sensitive attributes, and strong independence assumptions are needed to provide guarantees on the accuracy of the noisy estimates. In contrast, in this work we study using a proxy for the covariate variable and present a theoretical analysis that aims to characterize weaker conditions under which accurate fairness evaluation is possible. Furthermore, our theory identifies potential sources of errors and decouples them into two interpretable parts $\gamma$ and $\epsilon$. The first part $\gamma$ depends solely on the performance of the proxy such as precision and recall, whereas the second part $\epsilon$ captures correlations between all the variables of interest. We show that in many scenarios the error in the estimates is dominated by $\gamma$ via a linear dependence, whereas the dependence on the correlations $\epsilon$ only constitutes a lower order term. As a result we expand the understanding of scenarios where measuring model fairness via proxies can be an effective approach. Finally, we compare, via simulations, the theoretical upper-bounds to the distribution of simulated estimation errors and show that assuming some structure on the data, even weak, is key to significantly improve both theoretical guarantees and empirical results.

Multi-view classification is inspired by the behavior of humans, especially when fine-grained features or in our case rarely occurring anomalies are to be detected. Current contributions point to the problem of how high-dimensional data can be fused. In this work, we build upon the deep support vector data description algorithm and address multi-perspective anomaly detection using three different fusion techniques i.e. early fusion, late fusion, and late fusion with multiple decoders. We employ different augmentation techniques with a denoising process to deal with scarce one-class data, which further improves the performance (ROC AUC = 80\%). Furthermore, we introduce the dices dataset that consists of over 2000 grayscale images of falling dices from multiple perspectives, with 5\% of the images containing rare anomalies (e.g. drill holes, sawing, or scratches). We evaluate our approach on the new dices dataset using images from two different perspectives and also benchmark on the standard MNIST dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed approach exceeds the state-of-the-art on both the MNIST and dices datasets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that focuses on addressing multi-perspective anomaly detection in images by jointly using different perspectives together with one single objective function for anomaly detection.

The 3rd edition of the Montreal AI Ethics Institute's The State of AI Ethics captures the most relevant developments in AI Ethics since October 2020. It aims to help anyone, from machine learning experts to human rights activists and policymakers, quickly digest and understand the field's ever-changing developments. Through research and article summaries, as well as expert commentary, this report distills the research and reporting surrounding various domains related to the ethics of AI, including: algorithmic injustice, discrimination, ethical AI, labor impacts, misinformation, privacy, risk and security, social media, and more. In addition, The State of AI Ethics includes exclusive content written by world-class AI Ethics experts from universities, research institutes, consulting firms, and governments. Unique to this report is "The Abuse and Misogynoir Playbook," written by Dr. Katlyn Tuner (Research Scientist, Space Enabled Research Group, MIT), Dr. Danielle Wood (Assistant Professor, Program in Media Arts and Sciences; Assistant Professor, Aeronautics and Astronautics; Lead, Space Enabled Research Group, MIT) and Dr. Catherine D'Ignazio (Assistant Professor, Urban Science and Planning; Director, Data + Feminism Lab, MIT). The piece (and accompanying infographic), is a deep-dive into the historical and systematic silencing, erasure, and revision of Black women's contributions to knowledge and scholarship in the United Stations, and globally. Exposing and countering this Playbook has become increasingly important following the firing of AI Ethics expert Dr. Timnit Gebru (and several of her supporters) at Google. This report should be used not only as a point of reference and insight on the latest thinking in the field of AI Ethics, but should also be used as a tool for introspection as we aim to foster a more nuanced conversation regarding the impacts of AI on the world.

The variety of services and functionality offered by various cloud service providers (CSP) have exploded lately. Utilizing such services has created numerous opportunities for enterprises infrastructure to become cloud-based and, in turn, assisted the enterprises to easily and flexibly offer services to their customers. The practice of renting out access to servers to clients for computing and storage purposes is known as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The popularity of IaaS has led to serious and critical concerns with respect to the cyber security and privacy. In particular, malware is often leveraged by malicious entities against cloud services to compromise sensitive data or to obstruct their functionality. In response to this growing menace, malware detection for cloud environments has become a widely researched topic with numerous methods being proposed and deployed. In this paper, we present online malware detection based on process level performance metrics, and analyze the effectiveness of different baseline machine learning models including, Support Vector Classifier (SVC), Random Forest Classifier (RFC), KNearest Neighbor (KNN), Gradient Boosted Classifier (GBC), Gaussian Naive Bayes (GNB) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). Our analysis conclude that neural network models can most accurately detect the impact malware have on the process level features of virtual machines in the cloud, and therefore are best suited to detect them. Our models were trained, validated, and tested by using a dataset of 40,680 malicious and benign samples. The dataset was complied by running different families of malware (collected from VirusTotal) in a live cloud environment and collecting the process level features.

Robustness of decision rules to shifts in the data-generating process is crucial to the successful deployment of decision-making systems. Such shifts can be viewed as interventions on a causal graph, which capture (possibly hypothetical) changes in the data-generating process, whether due to natural reasons or by the action of an adversary. We consider causal Bayesian networks and formally define the interventional robustness problem, a novel model-based notion of robustness for decision functions that measures worst-case performance with respect to a set of interventions that denote changes to parameters and/or causal influences. By relying on a tractable representation of Bayesian networks as arithmetic circuits, we provide efficient algorithms for computing guaranteed upper and lower bounds on the interventional robustness probabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that the methods yield useful and interpretable bounds for a range of practical networks, paving the way towards provably causally robust decision-making systems.

We extended dynamic time warping (DTW) into interval-based dynamic time warping (iDTW), including (A) interval-based representation (iRep): [1] abstracting raw, time-stamped data into interval-based abstractions, [2] comparison-period scoping, [3] partitioning abstract intervals into a given temporal granularity; (B) interval-based matching (iMatch): matching partitioned, abstract-concepts records, using a modified DTW. Using domain knowledge, we abstracted the raw data of medical records, for up to three concepts out of four or five relevant concepts, into two interval types: State abstractions (e.g. LOW, HIGH) and Gradient abstractions (e.g. INCREASING, DECREASING). We created all uni-dimensional (State or Gradient) or multi-dimensional (State and Gradient) abstraction combinations. Tasks: Classifying 161 oncology patients records as autologous or allogenic bone-marrow transplantation; classifying 125 hepatitis patients records as B or C hepatitis; predicting micro- or macro-albuminuria in the next year for 151 Type 2 diabetes patients. We used a k-Nearest-Neighbors majority, k=1 to SQRT(N), N = set size. 50,328 10-fold cross-validation experiments were performed: 23,400 (Oncology), 19,800 (Hepatitis), 7,128 (Diabetes). Measures: Area Under the Curve (AUC), optimal Youden's Index. Paired t-tests compared result vectors for equivalent configurations other than a tested variable, to determine a significant mean accuracy difference (P<0.05). Mean classification and prediction using abstractions was significantly better than using only raw time-stamped data. In each domain, at least one abstraction combination led to a significantly better performance than using raw data. Increasing feature number, and using multi-dimensional abstractions, enhanced performance. Unlike when using raw data, optimal performance was often reached with k=5, using abstractions.

Educational technologies, and the systems of schooling in which they are deployed, enact particular ideologies about what is important to know and how learners should learn. As artificial intelligence technologies -- in education and beyond -- have led to inequitable outcomes for marginalized communities, various approaches have been developed to evaluate and mitigate AI systems' disparate impact. However, we argue in this paper that the dominant paradigm of evaluating fairness on the basis of performance disparities in AI models is inadequate for confronting the structural inequities that educational AI systems (re)produce. We draw on a lens of structural injustice informed by critical theory and Black feminist scholarship to critically interrogate several widely-studied and widely-adopted categories of educational AI systems and demonstrate how educational AI technologies are bound up in and reproduce historical legacies of structural injustice and inequity, regardless of the parity of their models' performance. We close with alternative visions for a more equitable future for educational AI research.

Using big data to analyze consumer behavior can provide effective decision-making tools for preventing customer attrition (churn) in customer relationship management (CRM). Focusing on a CRM dataset with several different categories of factors that impact customer heterogeneity (i.e., usage of self-care service channels, duration of service, and responsiveness to marketing actions), we provide new predictive analytics of customer churn rate based on a machine learning method that enhances the classification of logistic regression by adding a mixed penalty term. The proposed penalized logistic regression can prevent overfitting when dealing with big data and minimize the loss function when balancing the cost from the median (absolute value) and mean (squared value) regularization. We show the analytical properties of the proposed method and its computational advantage in this research. In addition, we investigate the performance of the proposed method with a CRM data set (that has a large number of features) under different settings by efficiently eliminating the disturbance of (1) least important features and (2) sensitivity from the minority (churn) class. Our empirical results confirm the expected performance of the proposed method in full compliance with the common classification criteria (i.e., accuracy, precision, and recall) for evaluating machine learning methods.

In multistage manufacturing systems, modeling multiple quality indices based on the process sensing variables is important. However, the classic modeling technique predicts each quality variable one at a time, which fails to consider the correlation within or between stages. We propose a deep multistage multi-task learning framework to jointly predict all output sensing variables in a unified end-to-end learning framework according to the sequential system architecture in the MMS. Our numerical studies and real case study have shown that the new model has a superior performance compared to many benchmark methods as well as great interpretability through developed variable selection techniques.