Quantifying and Measuring Bias and Engagement

Automated decision-making systems and machines – including search engines and intelligent assistants – are designed, evaluated, and optimised by defining frameworks that model the users who are going to interact with them. These models are typically a simplified representation of users (e.g., using the relevance of items delivered to the user as a surrogate for system quality) to operationalise the development process of such systems. A grand open challenge is to make these frameworks more complete, by including new aspects such as fairness, that are as important as the traditional definitions of quality, to inform the design, evaluation and optimisation of such systems.

Recent developments in machine learning, information access, and AI communities attempt to define mechanisms to minimise the creation and reinforcement of unintended cognitive biases.

However, there are a number of research questions related to quantifying and measuring bias and engagement that remain unexplored:
– Is it possible to measure bias by observing users interacting with search engines, or intelligent assistants?
– How do users perceive fairness, bias, or trust? How can these perceptions be measured effectively?
– To what extent can sensors in wearable devices and interaction logging (e.g., search queries, app swipes, notification dismissal, etc) inform the measurement of bias and engagement?
– Are the implicit signals captured from sensors and interaction logs correlated with explicit human ratings w.r.t. bias and engagement?