Fairness and integration in technologically-mediated socially-sensitive decisions (CoMeFair)

Socially-sensitive decisions and interactions are increasingly mediated by ICT technologies. Automated decision making systems affect our daily behaviour and interpersonal relationships through profiling, scoring and recommendations. All this comes with unprecedented opportunities: a deeper understanding of human behaviour and societal processes, particularly of the aspects of fairness of decisions, integration of social groups, and societal cohesion, together with a greater chance of favouring those aspects by the design of a suitable technology. CoMeFair proposes a visionary framework for the analysis and the embedding of fairness and social integration values in technologically mediated socially-sensitive decisions and interactions through native methods for data processing, data mining, and exploratory and predictive analytics. CoMeFair will be the enabling driver of: - a new generation of data-driven analytical tools to support the discovery and the fight against discrimination and segregation hidden into the (big) data of socially-sensitive decisions and interactions; - an ethically-based technology that by-design supports socially-sensitive decision making in data processing, in predictive modelling, in social simulation and inference, and in interactive exploration, offering safeguards of fairness and of integration of social groups. Our multi-disciplinary approach builds on a novel combination of sentiment analysis, data mining, social simulation, exploratory data analysis, law, social sciences, and moral sciences. As a proof of concept, we will conduct case studies endowed with society-wide datasets. CoMeFair opens a new strand of research, originating from the need of monitoring and enforcing compliance with individual and group rights in tools that are actually governing our society behind the scenes, and that are continuously challenging legislation on human rights.