Bias and Representation in Sociotechnical Systems – Danaë Metaxa

Computer Science Seminar Series
February 26, 2021

“Bias and Representation in Sociotechnical Systems”
Danaë Metaxa, Stanford University

Algorithms play a central role in our lives today, mediating our access to civic engagement, social connections, employment opportunities, news media, and more. While the sociotechnical systems deploying these algorithms—search engines, social networking sites, and others—have the potential to dramatically improve human life, they also run the risk of reproducing or intensifying social inequities. In Danaë Metaxa's research, they ask whether and how these systems are biased and how those biases impact users. Understanding sociotechnical systems and their effects requires a combination of computational and social techniques. In this talk, Metaxa will describe their work conducting algorithm audits and randomized controlled user experiments to study representation and bias, focusing on their recent study of gender and racial bias in image searches. By auditing gender and race in image search results for common U.S. occupations and comparing to baselines in the U.S. workforce, they find that marginalized people are underrepresented relative to their workforce participation rates. When measuring people’s responses to synthetic search results in which gender and racial composition are manipulated, however, one can see that the effect of diverse image search results is complex and mediated by the user’s own identity. Metaxa will conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for building sociotechnical systems and directions for future research studying algorithmic bias.

Danaë Metaxa (they/she) is a PhD candidate in computer science at Stanford University, advised by James Landay and Jeff Hancock. A member of the Human-Computer Interaction group, Metaxa focuses on building and understanding sociotechnical systems and their effects on users in domains like employment and politics. Metaxa has been a predoctoral scholar with Stanford’s Program on Democracy and the Internet, a fellow with the McCoy Center for Ethics in Society, and the winner of an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.