Congratulations Arsh!

Congratulations to Arsh Chowdhry on successfully defending his master’s thesis today!

In his research, Arsh developed a novel method for training classification models using multi-objective optimization, such that the resulting models can be simultaneously accurate and fair. He demonstrated that in many cases, taking account of fairness explicitly during the training process through multi-objective optimization means that high accuracy can be achieved at the same time as fairness - something that often doesn’t occur using traditional training methods. In other cases, the approach reveals a trade-off between accuracy and fairness, meaning that decision-makers can choose how to balance the competing priorities of prediction accuracy and different types of fairness when selecting which model to deploy and in a way that is specific to their context.

This is a fantastic new way of thinking about how to train machine learning models that can empower people to build AI systems that do not discriminate based on protected characteristics

Great work, Arsh, and fantastic presentation today!