Wu and He receive FAccT distinguished paper award

Ziwei Wu
Ziwei Wu
Jingrui He
Jingrui He, Professor and MSIM Program Director

A paper coauthored by PhD student Ziwei Wu and Associate Professor Jingrui He received the distinguished paper award during the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT). The interdisciplinary conference, which was held on June 21-24 in Seoul, South Korea, brings together a diverse community of scholars from computer science, law, social sciences, and humanities.

In their paper, "Fairness-aware Model-agnostic Positive and Unlabeled Learning," Wu and He examine the issue of "fairness" when learners only have access to positive and unlabeled data, such as medical diagnosis, criminal assessment, and recommender systems that predict user preferences. According to the researchers, fairness must be carefully considered to ensure the absence of discrimination against certain social groups.

"We designed a model-agnostic post-processing framework called FairPUL based on the first derivation of the theoretical optimal fair classifier in the positive and unlabeled learning setting," said Wu. "Our proposed FairPUL can accommodate different base models and enjoys the consistency property."

Through experiments using synthetic and real-world data sets, Wu and He find the new framework performs favorably against state-of-the-art frameworks in both positive and unlabeled learning (PUL) and fair classification.

"Our proposed framework is expected to significantly enhance the fairness of predictive models built for some high-impact applications such as medical diagnosis and criminal assessment, while improving or maintaining the high prediction performance by effectively leveraging the unlabeled data," said He.

Wu's research focuses on the design of fairness-aware machine learning algorithms and their applications in real-world tasks. She earned her bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Science and Technology of China.

He's general research theme is to design, build, and test a suite of automated and semi-automated methods to explore, understand, characterize, and predict real-world data by means of statistical machine learning. She received her PhD in machine learning from Carnegie Mellon University.

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Huang named a 2025–2026 Linowes Fellow

Associate Professor Yun Huang has been named a 2025–2026 Linowes Fellow by the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois. She is also the recipient of a 2024–2025 fellowship, which "provides exceptionally promising tenure-stream faculty with opportunities for innovation and discovery using the Cline Center's data holdings and/or analytic tools."

Yun Huang

New book explores video standards in film and archives

A new book co-authored by iSchool Adjunct Lecturer Jimi Jones and Marek Jancovic, assistant professor of media studies at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, examines video file standards and the tensions that have emerged between the film industry and the archiving community that is tasked with preserving cultural cinematic productions. 

Jimi Jones

Chin receives NSF CAREER award

Assistant Professor Jessie Chin has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award to support lifelong learning and foster information literacy. This prestigious award is given in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. Chin’s project, “Search as a Mechanism for Learning,” will be supported by a five-year, $629,451 grant from the NSF.

Jessie Chin

What are the effects of trade restrictions on digital technologies?

President Donald Trump has threatened to levy higher tariffs on more than two dozen countries and on various products in the past few months. China in particular has been a target of the administration’s trade wars, aimed at preventing its dominance in areas such as artificial intelligence, although the U.S. government announced recently that it would sell advanced semiconductors used in AI to China. Assistant Professor Meicen Sun spoke with News Bureau arts and humanities editor Jodi Heckel about the effects of trade restrictions.

Meicen Sun

Hassan selected for IAPP Westin Scholar Award

PhD student Muhammad Hassan has been selected as an IAPP Westin Scholar Award honoree. The annual awards were created by the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) to support students who are identified as future leaders in the field of privacy and data protection. 

Muhammad Hassan