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DESCRIPTION:1. The Power of Encounters 2. Algorithmic fairness in online decision-making
URL;VALUE=URI:https://www.csa.iisc.ac.in/newweb/event/51/1-the-power-of-encounters-2-algorithmic-fairness-in-online-decision-making/
SUMMARY:1. A secure encounter is an agreement by two anonymous devices to have met at a given time and place. An associated shared secret enables the devices to subsequently confirm their encounter and communicate securely. In this talk, I will sketch how this simple idea enables fascinating new forms of privacy-preserving, contextual, secure communication among personal and IoT devices, and enables users to produce selective evidence of their personhood and physical whereabouts. Encounters enable powerful forms of secure group communication among devices connected by chains of encounters, subject to spatial, temporal, and causality constraints.  Applications range from connecting event attendees and virtual guest books to disseminating targeted health risk warnings, soliciting information and witnesses related to an incident, and tracing missing persons, all while maintaining users’ privacy.  Encounters also enable selective proofs of device (co-)location at a given time and place.  Finally, encounters can provide evidence of a unique physical trajectory, which suggests a human user and promises a new defense to Sybil attacks.

2. There is growing concern about fairness in algorithmic decision making: Are algorithmic decisions treating different groups fairly?  How can we make them fairer?  What do we even mean by fair?  In this talk I will discuss some of our work on this topic, focusing on the setting of online decision making.  For instance, a classic result states that given a collection of predictors, one can adaptively combine them to perform nearly as well as the best of those predictors in hindsight (achieve “no regret”) without any stochastic assumptions.  Can one extend this guarantee so that if the predictors are themselves fair (according to a given definition), then the overall combination is fair as well (according to the same definition)? I will discuss this and other issues.  This is joint work with Suriya Gunasekar, Thodoris Lykouris, and Nati Srebro.
DTSTART:20200129T120000Z
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