Dr. Payal Arora gave a keynote at the Fairness, Accountability and Transparency (FAT) Asia forum organized by Digital Asia Hub, a center on technology innovation and impact in the Asian region. This is the Asian version of the multi-disciplinary conference that brings together researchers and practitioners interested in fairness, accountability, and transparency in socio-technical systems.
The theme for this conference goes beyond the futuristic enthusiasm for gadgets to more on responsibility with these new technologies. Their call explains how there is growing concern about the implications of an algorithm-driven society. Scholars and thinkers are debating the potential impact of automated decision-making on equality, autonomy, and dignity, and addressing the need for oversight mechanisms that protect fundamental freedoms and human agency.
A global community has converged around the themes of fairness, accountability, and transparency, as part of the attempt to address opaque systems, power and information asymmetries, and due process. A series of FAT/ML conferences was instrumental in elevating a multidisciplinary approach (along with Ethics in NLP and similar convenings) towards technology values. The FAT initiative expanded the focus beyond machine learning and, since 2018, the (soon to be renamed) ACM FAT conference has been one of the most influential annual events in this area of research.