Agency: Human and Non-Human

Recent discussions of non-human agency—the agency of “things” or of “actants”—have challenged the putative differences between human and non-human agency, particularly in the work of Jane Bennett and Bruno Latour. But their reliance on an insufficiently questioned picture of human agency continues to undermine their attempts to make sense of non-human agency, and to think anew the relation between human and non-human agency, a task which has become all the more urgent as we come to grips with the implications of the Anthropocene. In this paper, I propose an alternative conception of agency that better captures what is distinctive to both human and non-human agency.

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Nikolas Kompridis
Visting Scholar 
Centre for Ethics

Quantifying (Un)Fairness

In the machine learning fairness literature, the majority of fairness definitions are formalized for the binary case. This binary formalization allows for simple hypothetical demonstrations of the fairness definitions and provides researchers the ability to prove theorems. However, in clinical settings, the binary case is often too simple. As a consequence, we must expand machine learning definitions of fairness beyond these binary formulations. In this work, we analyze different ways of expanding fairness definitions beyond the binary case, highlighting edge cases where such expansions do not work as expected. We perform empirical analysis on a clinical task to assess how likely each edge case is for non-binary expansion, and consider the clinical feasibility and ramifications of such decisions.

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Mohamed Abdalla
University of Toronto
Computer Science