Framework for Identification and Prevention of Direct and Indirect Discrimination using Data mining

Extraction of useful and important information from huge collection of data is known as data mining. Negative social perception about data mining is also there, among which potential privacy invasion and potential discrimination are there. Discrimination involves unequally or unfairly treating people on the basis of their belongings to a specific group. Automated data collection and data mining techniques like classification rule mining have made easier to make automated decisions, like loan granting/denial, insurance premium computation, etc. If the training data sets are biased in what regards discriminatory (sensitive) attributes like age, gender, race, religion, etc., discriminatory decisions may ensue. For this reason, antidiscrimination techniques including discrimination discovery, identification and prevention have been introduced in data mining. Discrimination may of two types, either direct or indirect. Direct discrimination is the one where decisions are taken on basis of sensitive attributes. Indirect discrimination is the one where decisions are made based on non-sensitive attributes which are strongly correlated with biased sensitive ones. In this paper, we are dealing with discrimination prevention in data mining and propose new methods applicable for direct or indirect discrimination prevention individually or both at the same time. We discuss how to clean training data sets and transformed data sets in such a way that direct and/or indirect discriminatory decision rules are converted to legitimate (non-discriminatory) classification rules. We also propose new measures and metrics to analyse the utility of the proposed approaches and we compare these approaches

Global business and human rights: the UN “norms on the responsibility of transnational corporations and other business enterprises with regard to human rights” - a requiem

On 11 June 2011, the United Nations Human Rights Council endorsed the ‘Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights’ as a new set of guiding principles for global business designed to provide a global standard for preventing and addressing the risk of adverse impacts on human rights linked to business activity. This outcome was preceded by an earlier unsuccessful attempt by a Sub-Commission of the UN Commission on Human Rights to win approval for a set of binding corporate human rights norms, the so called “Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights”. This article identifies and discusses the reasons why the Norms eventually failed to win approval by the then UN Commission on Human Rights. This discussion is important in order to understand the difficulties in establishing binding ‘hard law’ obligations for Transnational Corporations with regard to human rights within the wider framework of international law. It is crucial to understand possible motives as well as the underlying rationale which lead first to the adoption and then the rapid abandoning of the Norms: such a discussion will also shed light on the prospects and trends of concepts of indirect, vague voluntarism of business human rights compliance, as well as on prospects of finding alternative solutions, and finally the rationale and effect of the ‘Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights’

On Discrimination Discovery and Removal in Ranked Data using Causal Graph

Predictive models learned from historical data are widely used to help companies and organizations make decisions. However, they may digitally unfairly treat unwanted groups, raising concerns about fairness and discrimination. In this paper, we study the fairness-aware ranking problem which aims to discover discrimination in ranked datasets and reconstruct the fair ranking. Existing methods in fairness-aware ranking are mainly based on statistical parity that cannot measure the true discriminatory effect since discrimination is causal. On the other hand, existing methods in causal-based anti-discrimination learning focus on classification problems and cannot be directly applied to handle the ranked data. To address these limitations, we propose to map the rank position to a continuous score variable that represents the qualification of the candidates. Then, we build a causal graph that consists of both the discrete profile attributes and the continuous score. The path-specific effect technique is extended to the mixed-variable causal graph to identify both direct and indirect discrimination. The relationship between the path-specific effects for the ranked data and those for the binary decision is theoretically analyzed. Finally, algorithms for discovering and removing discrimination from a ranked dataset are developed. Experiments using the real dataset show the effectiveness of our approaches.Comment: 9 page

Mental Health in the Workplace: Situation Analyses, United States

Mental illness constitutes one of the world\u27s most critical and social health problems. It affects more human lives and wastes more human resources than any other disabling condition. The ILO’s activities promote the inclusion of persons with physical, psychiatric and intellectual disabilities into mainstream training and employment structures. The ILO’s primary goals regarding disability are to prepare and empower people with disabilities to pursue their employment goals and facilitate access to work and job opportunities in open labour markets, while sensitising policy makers, trade unions and employers to these issues. The ILO\u27s mandate on disability issues is specified in the ILO Convention 159 (1983) on vocational rehabilitation and employment. No. 159 defines a disabled person as an individual whose prospects of securing, retaining, and advancing in suitable employment are substantially reduced as a result of a duly recognised physical or mental impairment. The Convention established the principle of equal treatment and employment for workers with disabilities

Government Partnerships With Faith-based Service Providers: The State of the Law

Rapid change and significant uncertainty are the most noteworthy features of the legal environment for participation by faith-based organizations ("FBOs") in government-financed socialservices. Developments in federal constitutional law, statutorily based federal programs, and the administrative environment have altered the legal circumstances in which such opportunities mayappear. In addition, the body of law (federal, state, and local) concerning the employment relation, an emerging focus on state constitutional law, and the existing pattern of contractual relations between government entities and FBOs, contribute to an atmosphere of legal complexity surrounding this field. These patterns of change and uncertainty play a crucial role in the decisions of FBOs on the value and risks involved in participating in such programs, as well as in decisions by government agencies concerning whether and how to undertake such programs.The topics included are 1) the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. constitution, including recent cases involving the application of that Clause to FBOs in service partnerships with government; 2) state constitutional law as a source of impediments to state relationships with FBOs, and federal constitutional challenges to such impediments; 3) the law of employment discrimination – federal, state, and local – as it applies to FBOs in such partnerships; 4) federal programs that explicitly invite participation by FBOs; and 5) state social service contracts with FBOs, and the presence or absence of religionspecific provisions in such contracts

From peasant society to manufacturing society

Since the early 1990's when the first cases of HIV were found in Vietnam, the number of people infected with HIV has been increasing. Over half of the Vietnamese population is under the age of 25 and 78.9% of the reported cases of HIV are people between the ages of 20 and 39. This thesis work has been undertaken to evaluate whether there is a need to focus more on the youth in terms of prevention within HIV and AIDS related to the move from a peasant society to a more industrialised society. To investigate this, a literature desk study was carried out supported by key informant interviews and a small questionnaire. It was found that specifically the HIV and AIDS law, stigma, discrimination, gender roles, and risk-behaviour of migrants and the Vietnamese youth were important factors linked with vulnerability and livelihood change after doi moi. Although more research on a national level on the subject is needed, the findings indicate that changes have happened since doi moi which influences the linkages between livelihood change and HIV and AIDS vulnerability among the youth in Vietnam