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

Caracterizaciones de la perspectiva bioética en la clínica de Odontología

The assessment of dental practice bioethics tries located in the everyday life of the Discipline. This is reflected in the ongoing review of educational processes, communications, legal and other related to the exercise of the traditional rule bioethics and current legal requirement of informed consent. This study aimed to contribute to the improvement of educational processes related to Clinical Bioethics. It conducted a closed design with a descriptive observational research having as variables: a. "Bioethics Dental theoretical aspects" in graduate assistants and teachers b. "Ethical-clinical issues" related to clinical information, confidentiality and clinical care dental c. "Protocols of care for patients." We have a sample of 40 graduate teachers. The instrument of work involved a survey of structured type, closed and anonymous record sought valuations that respondents had about bioethical issues raised in its post-graduate clinical and space that they occupied in their educational programming. While raised different issues related to the difficulties and strengths of the inclusion of bioethics, most of the graduate teachers (95%) were willing to include new educational spaces within their courses. The training of professionals can be held with the participation of patients as subjects of teaching-learning process in which they are presented with the risks and benefits. This task is based then on the right of patients to decide about their own health.La evaluación bioética de la práctica odontológica intenta ubicarse en la vida cotidiana de la Disciplina. Esto se refleja en la permanente revisión de procesos educativos, comunicacionales, jurídicos y otros vinculados con el ejercicio de la tradicional regla bioética y actual obligación legal del consentimiento informado. El presente estudio buscó contribuir con el perfeccionamiento de los procesos educativos vinculados con la Bioética Clínica. Se llevó adelante un diseño cerrado con una investigación de tipo observacional descriptiva teniendo como variables: a. “aspectos teóricos sobre Bioética Odontológica” en auxiliares y profesores de postgrado; b. “problemáticas éticas-clínicas” relacionadas con la información clínica, la confidencialidad y la atención clínica odontológica; c. “protocolos de atención a pacientes”. Se tomó una muestra de 40 docentes de Postgrado. El instrumento de trabajo comprendió una encuesta de tipo estructurada, cerrada y anónima que buscó registrar las valoraciones que los encuestados poseían con respecto a las cuestiones bioéticas planteadas en sus clínicas de postgrado y el espacio que las mismas ocuparon en sus programaciones pedagógicas. Si bien se plantearon diferentes cuestiones vinculadas con las dificultades y fortalezas de la inclusión de la Bioética, la mayoría de los docentes del Postgrado (95%) estuvieron dispuestos a incluir nuevos espacios educativos dentro de sus Cursos.  La formación continua de los profesionales puede ser realizada con la participación de los pacientes como sujetos del proceso enseñanza-aprendizaje en donde se les presenta los riesgos y beneficios. Esta tarea se funda entonces en el derecho de los pacientes a decidir sobre su propia salud

Dysregulation of Kv3.4 channels in dorsal root ganglia following spinal cord injury.

Spinal cord injury (SCI) patients develop chronic pain involving poorly understood central and peripheral mechanisms. Because dysregulation of the voltage-gated Kv3.4 channel has been implicated in the hyperexcitable state of dorsal root ganglion (DRG) neurons following direct injury of sensory nerves, we asked whether such a dysregulation also plays a role in SCI. Kv3.4 channels are expressed in DRG neurons, where they help regulate action potential (AP) repolarization in a manner that depends on the modulation of inactivation by protein kinase C (PKC)-dependent phosphorylation of the channel\u27s inactivation domain. Here, we report that, 2 weeks after cervical hemicontusion SCI, injured rats exhibit contralateral hypersensitivity to stimuli accompanied by accentuated repetitive spiking in putative DRG nociceptors. Also in these neurons at 1 week after laminectomy and SCI, Kv3.4 channel inactivation is impaired compared with naive nonsurgical controls. At 2-6 weeks after laminectomy, however, Kv3.4 channel inactivation returns to naive levels. Conversely, Kv3.4 currents at 2-6 weeks post-SCI are downregulated and remain slow-inactivating. Immunohistochemistry indicated that downregulation mainly resulted from decreased surface expression of the Kv3.4 channel, as whole-DRG-protein and single-cell mRNA transcript levels did not change. Furthermore, consistent with Kv3.4 channel dysregulation, PKC activation failed to shorten the AP duration of small-diameter DRG neurons. Finally, re-expressing synthetic Kv3.4 currents under dynamic clamp conditions dampened repetitive spiking in the neurons from SCI rats. These results suggest a novel peripheral mechanism of post-SCI pain sensitization implicating Kv3.4 channel dysregulation and potential Kv3.4-based therapeutic interventions

Effects of dairy intake on weight maintenance

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licens

Oriented coloring: complexity and approximation

International audienceThis paper is devoted to an oriented coloring problem motivated by a task assignment model. A recent result established the NP-completeness of deciding whether a digraph is k-oriented colorable; we extend this result to the classes of bipartite digraphs and circuit-free digraphs. Finally, we investigate the approximation of this problem: both positive and negative results are devised