Dr. Frederica Darema Lecture Series in Computer Science Presents Min Kyung Lee

Min Kyung Lee, assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, is the next featured speaker in the Dr. Frederica Darema Lecture Series in Computer Science, which will be held Wednesday April 27 from 12:45 p.m. to 1:45 p.m. at room 113 in the Stuart Building. Lee will deliver her lecture, “Enabling Procedurally-Fair and Participatory AI.”

As artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming work and society, it is ever more important to ensure that AI systems are fair and trustworthy, and support critical values and priorities in organizations and communities. I argue that making AI procedurally fair and participatory is critical to achieving the goal. We should enable procedural justice— the perceived fairness of the decision-making process—in AI through transparency and participation, and design useful and empowering AI by learning from the creativity and lived experience of people who use or are affected by AI. In this talk, I will present empirical work that elucidates the importance of procedural justice in trustworthy AI. I will then describe a series of novel design work that enables stakeholder participation throughout the AI design and deployment cycle: i) the WeBuildAI framework, a novel participatory framework that involves stakeholders in algorithmic design, and ii) participatory design methods for envisioning new forms of algorithmic management and worker well-being metrics.

Min Kyung Lee is an assistant professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Lee is a human-computer interaction researcher, and has extensive experiences in developing theories, methods and tools for human-centered AI and deploying them in practice through collaboration with real-world stakeholders and organizations. She proposed a participatory framework that empowers community members to design matching algorithms that govern their own communities. She also conducted one of the first studies investigating public perceptions of algorithmic fairness and the impacts of algorithmic management. Her current research is inspired by and complements her previous work on social robots for long-term interaction, seamless human-robot handovers, and telepresence robots.

Lee is a Siebel Scholar and has received the Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence, research grants from NSF and Uptake, and five best paper awards and honorable mentions and two demo/video awards in venues such as CHI, CSCW, DIS, HRI and MobiSys. She is an Associate Editor of Human-Computer Interaction and a Senior Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction. Her work has been featured in media outlets.

The Illinois Institute of Technology College of Computing’s Dr. Frederica Darema Lecture Series in Computer Science is funded by an endowment to help advance female and minority early-stage computer science researchers at U.S. academic institutions. The lecture series is designed to encourage women and individuals from under-represented groups to pursue academic careers in computer sciences, and to focus on providing speaking opportunities for tenure track assistant professors (or the equivalent) at U.S. institutions in their fourth to sixth year. Lectureships may also be awarded to exceptional junior researchers in U.S. federal or industrial research laboratories in the third to fifth years of their careers, following doctoral/postdoctoral studies.