Undergraduate researcher takes first place at ACM competition

Computer science undergraduate Serafina Kamp received first place at the ACM Student Research Competition, hosted by the Grace Hopper Celebration. Kamp presented her work “Robustness of Fairness in Machine Learning,” advised by Dr. Sindhu Kutty.

The competition is an internationally recognized contest where undergraduate and graduate students present their original research. As the top undergraduate student, Kamp will also advance to the ACM Grand Finals.

Kamp’s research focuses on investigating the fairness of policies learned through machine learning algorithms from popular datasets. Machine learning algorithms are used in making decisions that affect society, making it an important task to reliably measure their fairness. Kamp’s project evaluated the robustness of fairness metrics in two distinct domains using bootstrap sampling. She showed that fairness metrics are less robust than performance metrics, and that this lack of robustness most affects socially disadvantaged groups.

The project was co-authored by Andong Lius Li Zhao, a CS alum and current PhD student at Northwestern University, and Jillian Lew, current CS student.