Asia J. Biega

Responsible Computing

I am a tenure-track faculty member (W2) leading the Responsible Computing group. Prior to joining MPI-SP, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics in AI (FATE) Group at Microsoft Research Montréal. I completed my PhD in Computer Science at MPI-INF and MPI-SWS, and gained industrial experience at Google and consulting for Microsoft product teams.


In the Responsible Computing group, we study online socio-technical systems—the algorithms, the people, the legal regulations, the interfaces and the data. We seek to understand both the influence online systems have on user behavior, cognition, and well-being, as well as the impacts of user biases and preferences on the functioning of those systems. We explore computational interpretations of legal requirements as well as concepts from social sciences and humanities to enhance our understanding of the interplay between people and online systems and develop novel technical solutions mitigating systemic and individual harms. Our work is often grounded in interdisciplinary collaborations, allowing us not only to make technical contributions in Computer Science, but also lend our computing expertise to inform research in other fields.


Our current focus is on responsible computing principles for information access and social computing systems (including search, recommendation, assistive typing, sharing economy, crowdsourcing or social media systems). We publish our work at top-tier conferences in the areas of Web & Information Retrieval, Social Computing, and Computing & Society.


Topics we’re currently working on:
  • Operationalizing concepts from data protection laws such as GDPR (data minimization, fairness, privacy, accountability, transparency).
  • Modeling of human biases in the context information access and social computing systems.
  • Measurement methodologies to quantify the harms and the impacts of information access and social computing systems on user behavior, beliefs, cognition, and well-being.

Responsible Computing Group

Name
Alessandro Fabris
Postdoc
Lin Kyi
Amruta Mahuli
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