Date of Submission
Fall 12-13-2022
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science in Computer Science (MSCS)
Department
Computer Science
Committee Chair/First Advisor
Dr. Ramazan Aygun
Track
Others
Artificial Intelligence
Chair
Dr. Yong Pei
Committee Member
Dr. Jiho Noh
Committee Member
Dr. Ahyoung Lee
Abstract
Roughly 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is generated daily in this digital era. Manual processing of such huge amounts of data to extract useful information is nearly impossible but with the widespread use of machine learning algorithms and their ability to process enormous data in a fast, cost-effective, and scalable way has proven to be a preferred choice to glean useful insights and solve business problems in many domains. With this widespread use of machine learning algorithms there has always been concerns about the ethical issues that may arise from the use of this modern technology. While achieving high accuracies, accomplishing trustable and fair machine learning has been challenging. Maintaining data fairness and privacy is one of the top challenges faced by the industry as organizations employ various machine learning algorithms to automatically make decisions based on trends from previously collected data. Protected group or attribute refers to the group of individuals towards whom the system has some preconceived reservations and hence is discriminatory. Discrimination is the unjustified treatment towards a particular category of people based on their race, age, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or disability. If we use the data with preconceived reservation or inbuilt discrimination towards certain group, then the model trained on such data will also be discriminatory towards these specific individuals.