Virginie Do, Sam Corbett-Davies, Jamal Atif and Nicolas Usunier won the AAAI 2022 outstanding paper award for their work Online certification of preference-based fairness for personalized recommender systems. The award was presented at this year's virtual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Here, Virginie Do tells us more about the implications of this research, the methodology, and their main findings. Our paper is about fairness in recommender systems, and more precisely about certifying that recommender systems treat their users fairly. We conducted this research in a context of increased interest in auditing for the fairness of recommender systems.

In 1971, philosopher John Rawls proposed a thought experiment to understand the idea of fairness: the veil of ignorance. What if, he asked, we could erase our brains so we had no memory of who we were -- our race, our income level, our profession, anything that may influence our opinion? Who would we protect, and who would we serve with our policies? The veil of ignorance is a philosophical exercise for thinking about justice and society. But it can be applied to the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence (AI) as well. Can AI provide the veil of ignorance that would lead us to objective and ideal outcomes?