2021 Call for Tutorials (Closed)

Tutorial types

Tutorials should address technical, policy, regulatory, ethical, or social science aspects of FAccT issues for a broad audience. We are soliciting two types of tutorials for 2021: translation tutorials and implications tutorials. We will give presenters either 45 or 90 minutes to present a tutorial.

The goal of tutorials, whether introducing methods, presenting a broad overview of an application domain, or a deep dive on a case study, is to educate and broaden the perspective of our interdisciplinary community. Thus it is especially important that tutorial speakers be excellent educators (even if not by profession) and it is crucial that the diversity of perspectives represents the diversity of the populations impacted by this technology throughout the world.

Translation Tutorials

We are interested in tutorials that aim to "translate" between disciplines. For instance, a translational computer science tutorial should explain the relevant concepts in a way that makes them practically useful for lawyers, policy makers, social scientists, philosophers, and practitioners more broadly. Likewise a translational law-focused tutorial should communicate in a way that imparts the relevant legal concepts to policy-makers, social scientists, philosophers, and computer scientists.

These tutorials should be geared towards an interested audience, but should not assume more than a beginner’s familiarity with the topics. Translation tutorials should situate the topic in the related literature and proceed to a detailed explanation of that specific topic.

Implications Tutorials

Implications tutorials should describe, analyse and critique known legal, policy, or socio-economic effects of the use of algorithmic systems.These tutorials should emphasize “real-world” implications with known examples. For instance, an implications tutorial may focus on specific case studies, walking the audience through the likely or known causes and effects of a particular ACM FAccT issue for specific individuals, communities or society more broadly.

We particularly encourage submissions by human rights / civil rights experts, including (but not limited to) lawyers, policy advocates, civil society representatives, and others who work closely with individuals and communities affected by algorithmic systems and who can offer a more in-depth understanding of the processes around the use of these systems.

Suggested List of Topics

Suggested topics for tutorials include but are not limited to the following list. Please note that we welcome perspectives from a variety of disciplines, including computer science, economics, law, philosophy, political science, sociology, education and social work.

• Discrimination, social equality and vulnerability, e.g. theories of discrimination, the limitations of analogy in extending positive law, qualitative and quantitative assessment of vulnerability.
• Individual and collective accountability, e.g. theories of corporate responsibility, liability in tort law, practices of blame and praise.
• Democratic legitimacy, e.g. distinguishing between whether the content of a decision is justified, and who should get to decide; accounts of how states and others acquire their authority to govern.
• Perspectives and theory relating to the power exercised by technology firms through control over data, software, platforms, and protocols; e.g. market concentration in software services, introduction to competing analyses of power
• Key concepts related to computer science and their applicability to areas of broad interest for the FAccT community (e.g. algorithmic fairness, explainability and model interpretability, causal inference, uncertainty estimation, game theory, computational economics, computational social science).
• Investigations of the use and impact of automated decision making in industry (e.g. insurance, banking, marketing, media and social media, health, retail) and government services sectors.
• Accounts of the implications of deployment of socio-technical systems, especially in geographies previously under-represented in FAccT, such as Africa, Asia, South America and Oceania.
• Explanations and evaluations of regulatory models and their differences, including models originating outside North America and Europe.
• Explorations of and introductions to key concepts from Critical Race Theory, Critical Data Studies, Feminist Theory.
• Lessons drawn from non-computational epistemic traditions, including empirical methods in the social sciences, methods and limitations of inferring causality, and the contrast between quantitative and qualitative explanations and methodologies.
• Computational methods for collecting and analysing data about socio-technical systems ‘in the wild’, such as web scraping, their applications, strengths and weaknesses.
• Guidance for those employed within technology firms on how to effectively challenge the development of unethical technologies.
• How researchers can engage with strategic litigation relating to issues of fairness, accountability and transparency in socio-technical systems.

Application Process

The proposal should consist of a maximum of 2 pages + references and must include:

• The tutorial title. Titles should be in the format, "Translation Tutorial: title" or “Implications Tutorial: title" depending on the type of tutorial being proposed.
• The tutorial type. Select "Translation" or "Implications".
• The team. Given the duration of the tutorials, we encourage tutorials to be presented by one to three people, though more may be involved in its preparation. For the tutorial presenters, please include links to any artifacts that evidence ability to teach (e.g. video of a past talk, CV of teaching experience, authored literature reviews).
• A description of the topic you plan to cover, including an impact statement that clearly articulates the main goals and outcomes of the tutorial. Note that this description will be given the highest weight during the selection.
• A short timeline description of how you plan to break down the material over 45 or 90 minutes. Please also mention here the proposed length (45 or 90 mins), but keep in mind that we might conditionally accept a proposal and suggest a different length. Please explain how you are thinking about the “online experience” aspect of the tutorial (we will provide more resources closer to the event date about online experience best practices).
• Any critical citations.
• The timezones in which each presenter of the tutorial will be in during the conference period.

Submissions must be in PDF format and should ideally be formatted according to the two-column interim ACM Layout Template. Authors who are not familiar with ACM templates may simply submit their tutorial proposals for review in two-column format, with one inch margins, 9 point Times New Roman font. Submissions should be sent by 18 December 2020 (Anywhere on Earth) to tutorials@facctconference.org.