Conference Grant Reports: Tonya Nguyen at CSCW 2024
We are pleased to support our students sharing their work at the premiere conferences in their field. Tonya Nguyen presented her paper at the Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) conference in San Jose, Costa Rica, focusing on SFUSD's algorithmic school assignment system (Session: Contextualizing Fairness in AI).
She demonstrated how perceptions of fairness are shaped by socioeconomic backgrounds and how the algorithm’s processes are communicated.
Her findings reveal that fairness expectations often reflect social differences and can conflict with collective goals like diversity, a cornerstone of SFUSD's policy. Tonya highlighted the need to consider socioeconomic and cultural influences when designing algorithms and to address the tensions between individual and collective fairness.
She called for strategies to reconcile conflicting fairness definitions and emphasized the importance of including diverse voices in decision-making. Ultimately, algorithm designers and policymakers must make deliberate choices about whose fairness they prioritize.
The ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) is a premier international venue for research focused on understanding and improving technologies that support collaboration, communication, and social interactions. The conference explores topics such as social computing, workplace collaboration, online communities, algorithmic decision-making, and the societal implications of technology.