Fairness-Aware Ranking in Search & Recommendation Systems with Application to LinkedIn Talent Search

We present a framework for quantifying and mitigating algorithmic bias in mechanisms designed for ranking individuals, typically used as part of web-scale search and recommendation systems. We first propose complementary measures to quantify bias with respect to protected attributes such as gender and age. We then present algorithms for computing fairness-aware re-ranking of results. For a given search or recommendation task, our algorithms seek to achieve a desired distribution of top ranked results with respect to one or more protected attributes. We show that such a framework can be tailored to achieve fairness criteria such as equality of opportunity and demographic parity depending on the choice of the desired distribution. We evaluate the proposed algorithms via extensive simulations over different parameter choices, and study the effect of fairness-aware ranking on both bias and utility measures. We finally present the online A/B testing results from applying our framework towards representative ranking in LinkedIn Talent Search, and discuss the lessons learned in practice. Our approach resulted in tremendous improvement in the fairness metrics (nearly three fold increase in the number of search queries with representative results) without affecting the business metrics, which paved the way for deployment to 100% of LinkedIn Recruiter users worldwide. Ours is the first large-scale deployed framework for ensuring fairness in the hiring domain, with the potential positive impact for more than 630M LinkedIn members.Comment: This paper has been accepted for publication at ACM KDD 201

A Comprehensive Survey of Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Talent Analytics

In today's competitive and fast-evolving business environment, it is a critical time for organizations to rethink how to make talent-related decisions in a quantitative manner. Indeed, the recent development of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques have revolutionized human resource management. The availability of large-scale talent and management-related data provides unparalleled opportunities for business leaders to comprehend organizational behaviors and gain tangible knowledge from a data science perspective, which in turn delivers intelligence for real-time decision-making and effective talent management at work for their organizations. In the last decade, talent analytics has emerged as a promising field in applied data science for human resource management, garnering significant attention from AI communities and inspiring numerous research efforts. To this end, we present an up-to-date and comprehensive survey on AI technologies used for talent analytics in the field of human resource management. Specifically, we first provide the background knowledge of talent analytics and categorize various pertinent data. Subsequently, we offer a comprehensive taxonomy of relevant research efforts, categorized based on three distinct application-driven scenarios: talent management, organization management, and labor market analysis. In conclusion, we summarize the open challenges and potential prospects for future research directions in the domain of AI-driven talent analytics.Comment: 30 pages, 15 figure

Disentangling and Operationalizing AI Fairness at LinkedIn

Operationalizing AI fairness at LinkedIn's scale is challenging not only because there are multiple mutually incompatible definitions of fairness but also because determining what is fair depends on the specifics and context of the product where AI is deployed. Moreover, AI practitioners need clarity on what fairness expectations need to be addressed at the AI level. In this paper, we present the evolving AI fairness framework used at LinkedIn to address these three challenges. The framework disentangles AI fairness by separating out equal treatment and equitable product expectations. Rather than imposing a trade-off between these two commonly opposing interpretations of fairness, the framework provides clear guidelines for operationalizing equal AI treatment complemented with a product equity strategy. This paper focuses on the equal AI treatment component of LinkedIn's AI fairness framework, shares the principles that support it, and illustrates their application through a case study. We hope this paper will encourage other big tech companies to join us in sharing their approach to operationalizing AI fairness at scale, so that together we can keep advancing this constantly evolving field

The Multisided Complexity of Fairness in Recommender Systems

Recommender systems are poised at the interface between stakeholders: for example, job applicants and employers in the case of recommendations of employment listings, or artists and listeners in the case of music recommendation. In such multisided platforms, recommender systems play a key role in enabling discovery of products and information at large scales. However, as they have become more and more pervasive in society, the equitable distribution of their benefits and harms have been increasingly under scrutiny, as is the case with machine learning generally. While recommender systems can exhibit many of the biases encountered in other machine learning settings, the intersection of personalization and multisidedness makes the question of fairness in recommender systems manifest itself quite differently. In this article, we discuss recent work in the area of multisided fairness in recommendation, starting with a brief introduction to core ideas in algorithmic fairness and multistakeholder recommendation. We describe techniques for measuring fairness and algorithmic approaches for enhancing fairness in recommendation outputs. We also discuss feedback and popularity effects that can lead to unfair recommendation outcomes. Finally, we introduce several promising directions for future research in this area

A Survey on Fairness-aware Recommender Systems

As information filtering services, recommender systems have extremely enriched our daily life by providing personalized suggestions and facilitating people in decision-making, which makes them vital and indispensable to human society in the information era. However, as people become more dependent on them, recent studies show that recommender systems potentially own unintentional impacts on society and individuals because of their unfairness (e.g., gender discrimination in job recommendations). To develop trustworthy services, it is crucial to devise fairness-aware recommender systems that can mitigate these bias issues. In this survey, we summarise existing methodologies and practices of fairness in recommender systems. Firstly, we present concepts of fairness in different recommendation scenarios, comprehensively categorize current advances, and introduce typical methods to promote fairness in different stages of recommender systems. Next, after introducing datasets and evaluation metrics applied to assess the fairness of recommender systems, we will delve into the significant influence that fairness-aware recommender systems exert on real-world industrial applications. Subsequently, we highlight the connection between fairness and other principles of trustworthy recommender systems, aiming to consider trustworthiness principles holistically while advocating for fairness. Finally, we summarize this review, spotlighting promising opportunities in comprehending concepts, frameworks, the balance between accuracy and fairness, and the ties with trustworthiness, with the ultimate goal of fostering the development of fairness-aware recommender systems.Comment: 27 pages, 9 figure

Fairness and Bias in Algorithmic Hiring

Employers are adopting algorithmic hiring technology throughout the recruitment pipeline. Algorithmic fairness is especially applicable in this domain due to its high stakes and structural inequalities. Unfortunately, most work in this space provides partial treatment, often constrained by two competing narratives, optimistically focused on replacing biased recruiter decisions or pessimistically pointing to the automation of discrimination. Whether, and more importantly what types of, algorithmic hiring can be less biased and more beneficial to society than low-tech alternatives currently remains unanswered, to the detriment of trustworthiness. This multidisciplinary survey caters to practitioners and researchers with a balanced and integrated coverage of systems, biases, measures, mitigation strategies, datasets, and legal aspects of algorithmic hiring and fairness. Our work supports a contextualized understanding and governance of this technology by highlighting current opportunities and limitations, providing recommendations for future work to ensure shared benefits for all stakeholders