Responsible AI (RAI) is the science and practice of ensuring the design, development, use, and oversight of AI are socially sustainable---benefiting diverse stakeholders while controlling the risks. Achieving this goal requires active engagement and participation from the broader public. This paper introduces "We are AI: Taking Control of Technology," a public education course that brings the topics of AI and RAI to the general audience in a peer-learning setting. We outline the goals behind the course's development, discuss the multi-year iterative process that shaped its creation, and summarize its content. We also discuss two offerings of "We are AI" to an active and engaged group of librarians and professional staff at New York University, highlighting successes and areas for improvement. The course materials, including a multilingual comic book series by the same name, are publicly available and can be used independently. By sharing our experience in creating and teaching "We are AI", we aim to introduce these resources to the community of AI educators, researchers, and practitioners, supporting their public education efforts.

The recent rapid adoption of large language models (LLMs) highlights the critical need for benchmarking their fairness. Conventional fairness metrics, which focus on discrete accuracy-based evaluations (i.e., prediction correctness), fail to capture the implicit impact of model uncertainty (e.g., higher model confidence about one group over another despite similar accuracy). To address this limitation, we propose an uncertainty-aware fairness metric, UCerf, to enable a fine-grained evaluation of model fairness that is more reflective of the internal bias in model decisions. Furthermore, observing data size, diversity, and clarity issues in current datasets, we introduce a new gender-occupation fairness evaluation dataset with 31,756 samples for co-reference resolution, offering a more diverse and suitable benchmark for modern LLMs. Combining our metric and dataset, we provide insightful comparisons of eight open-source LLMs. For example, Mistral-8B exhibits suboptimal fairness due to high confidence in incorrect predictions, a detail overlooked by Equalized Odds but captured by UCerF. Overall, this work provides a holistic framework for LLM evaluation by jointly assessing fairness and uncertainty, enabling the development of more transparent and accountable AI systems.

Data missingness is a practical challenge of sustained interest to the scientific community. In this paper, we present Shades-of-Null, an evaluation suite for responsible missing value imputation. Our work is novel in two ways (i) we model realistic and socially-salient missingness scenarios that go beyond Rubin's classic Missing Completely at Random (MCAR), Missing At Random (MAR) and Missing Not At Random (MNAR) settings, to include multi-mechanism missingness (when different missingness patterns co-exist in the data) and missingness shift (when the missingness mechanism changes between training and test) (ii) we evaluate imputers holistically, based on imputation quality and imputation fairness, as well as on the predictive performance, fairness and stability of the models that are trained and tested on the data post-imputation. We use Shades-of-Null to conduct a large-scale empirical study involving 29,736 experimental pipelines, and find that while there is no single best-performing imputation approach for all missingness types, interesting trade-offs arise between predictive performance, fairness and stability, based on the combination of missingness scenario, imputer choice, and the architecture of the predictive model. We make Shades-of-Null publicly available, to enable researchers to rigorously evaluate missing value imputation methods on a wide range of metrics in plausible and socially meaningful scenarios.

In this paper, we interrogate whether data quality issues track demographic group membership (based on sex, race and age) and whether automated data cleaning — of the kind commonly used in production ML systems — impacts the fairness of predictions made by these systems. To the best of our knowledge, the impact of data cleaning on fairness in downstream tasks has not been investigated in the literature. We first analyse the tuples flagged by common error detection strategies in five research datasets. We find that, while specific data quality issues, such as higher rates of missing values, are associated with membership in historically disadvantaged groups, poor data quality does not generally track demographic group membership. As a follow-up, we conduct a large-scale empirical study on the impact of automated data cleaning on fairness, involving more than 26,000 model evaluations. We observe that, while automated data cleaning is unlikely to worsen accuracy, it is more likely to worsen fairness than to improve it, especially when the cleaning techniques are not carefully chosen. Furthermore, we find that the positive or negative impact of a particular cleaning technique often depends on the choice of fairness metric and group definition (single-attribute or intersectional). We make our code and experimental results publicly available. The analysis we conducted in this paper is difficult, primarily because it requires that we think holistically about disparities in data quality, disparities in the effectiveness of data cleaning methods, and impacts of such disparities on ML model performance for different demographic groups. Such holistic analysis can and should be supported by data engineering tools, and requires substantial data engineering research. Towards this goal, we discuss open research questions, envision the development of fairness-aware data cleaning methods, and their integration into complex pipelines for ML-based decision making.

In this paper, we interrogate whether data quality issues track demographic characteristics such as sex, race and age, and whether automated data cleaning — of the kind commonly used in production ML systems — impacts the fairness of predictions made by these systems. To the best of our knowledge, the impact of data cleaning on fairness in downstream tasks has not been investigated in the literature.We first analyze the tuples flagged by common error detection strategies in five research datasets. We find that, while specific data quality issues, such as higher rates of missing values, are associated with membership in historically disadvantaged groups, poor data quality does not generally track demographic group membership. As a follow-up, we conduct a large-scale empirical study on the impact of automated data cleaning on fairness, involving more than 26,000 model evaluations on five datasets. We observe that, while automated data cleaning has an insignificant impact on both accuracy and fairness in the majority of cases, it is more likely to worsen fairness than to improve it, especially when the cleaning techniques are not carefully chosen. This finding is both significant and worrying, given that it potentially implicates many production ML systems. We make our code and experimental results publicly available.The analysis we conducted in this paper is difficult, primarily because it requires that we think holistically about disparities in data quality, disparities in the effectiveness of data cleaning methods, and impacts of such disparities on ML model performance for different demographic groups. Such holistic analysis can and should be supported with the help of data engineering research. Towards this goal, we envision the development of fairness-aware data cleaning methods, and their integration into complex pipelines for ML-based decision making.

Automated hiring systems are among the fastest-developing of all high-stakes AI systems. Among these are algorithmic personality tests that use insights from psychometric testing, and promise to surface personality traits indicative of future success based on job seekers' resumes or social media profiles. We interrogate the validity of such systems using stability of the outputs they produce, noting that reliability is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for validity. Crucially, rather than challenging or affirming the assumptions made in psychometric testing - that personality is a meaningful and measurable construct, and that personality traits are indicative of future success on the job - we frame our audit methodology around testing the underlying assumptions made by the vendors of the algorithmic personality tests themselves. Our main contribution is the development of a socio-technical framework for auditing the stability of algorithmic systems. This contribution is supplemented with an open-source software library that implements the technical components of the audit, and can be used to conduct similar stability audits of algorithmic systems. We instantiate our framework with the audit of two real-world personality prediction systems, namely, Humantic AI and Crystal. The application of our audit framework demonstrates that both these systems show substantial instability with respect to key facets of measurement, and hence cannot be considered valid testing instruments.