Abstract:

Algorithmic decision-making has become pervasive in high-stakes domains such as health, education, and employment. This widespread adoption raises crucial concerns about the fairness of the algorithms adopted. In this talk, I will delve into a recent research line that explores individual fairness in combinatorial optimization problems, where many valid solutions may exist to a given problem instance. Our proposal, named distributional max-min fairness, leverages the power of randomization to maximize the expected satisfaction of the most disadvantaged individuals. The talk will highlight applications across fundamental algorithmic challenges, including matching, ranking, and shortest-path queries.

Francesco Bonchi is the Co-Founder and Research Director at CENTAI (Center for Artificial Intelligence) in Turin, Italy. He also holds a part-time position at Eurecat (Technological Center of Catalunya) in Barcelona, Spain. He also serves on the AI task-force of the Italian Government and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Anti-Financial Crime Digital Hub in Turin. Previously, he was the Scientific Director at the ISI Foundation in Turin and the Director of Research at Yahoo Labs in Barcelona. Dr. Bonchi's recent research interests encompass algorithms and learning on complex networks, fair and explainable AI, and the broader domain of trustworthiness and ethical aspects of data science and AI. He has authored over 250 publications in these fields, earning several Best Paper Awards, including at the prestigious World Wide Web Conference 2022. Additionally, he holds 9 US patents, which earned him the 2013 Yahoo Master Inventor Award. Dr. Bonchi has been the General Co-Chair of notable conferences such as ACM SIGKDD 2024, the 2023 European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD 2023), and the 5th IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA 2018). He has also been PC Chair of numerous international conferences, including The Web Conf (2026), ECML PKDD (2010 and 2018), the 16th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM 2016), the 28th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (HT 2017), and the 6th IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA 2019). He is a member of the Steering Committee of ECML PKDD and IEEE DSAA, and serves on the editorial boards of several journals.