Themis: Automatically Testing Software for Discrimination
by Rico Angell, Brittany Johnson, Yuriy Brun, Alexandra Meliou
Abstract:
Bias in decisions made by modern software is becoming a common and serious problem. We present Themis, an automated test suite generator to measure two types of discrimination, including causal relationships between sensitive inputs and program behavior. We explain how Themis can measure discrimination and aid its debugging, describe a set of optimizations Themis uses to reduce test suite size, and demonstrate Themis' effectiveness on open-source software. Themis is open-source and all our evaluation data are available at http://fairness.cs.umass.edu/. See a video of Themis in action: https://youtu.be/brB8wkaUesY
Citation:
Rico Angell, Brittany Johnson, Yuriy Brun, and Alexandra Meliou, Themis: Automatically Testing Software for Discrimination, in Proceedings of the Demonstrations Track at the The 26th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE), 2018, pp. 871–875 (Demonstration paper).
Bibtex:
@inproceedings{Angell18fse-demo,
 author = {Rico Angell and Brittany Johnson and Yuriy Brun and
Alexandra Meliou},
 title =
 {\href{https://people.cs.umass.edu/~brun/pubs/pubs/Angell18demo-fse.pdf}{Themis:
Automatically Testing Software for Discrimination}},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the Demonstrations Track at the The 26th ACM
 Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the
 Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE)},
 venue = {ESEC/FSE},
 address = {Lake Buena Vista, FL, USA},
 month = nov,
 date = {6--9},
 year = {2018},
 accept = {$\frac{16}{36} \approx 44\%$},
 abstract = {Bias in decisions made by modern software is becoming a common
 and serious problem. We present Themis, an automated test suite generator
 to measure two types of discrimination, including causal relationships
 between sensitive inputs and program behavior. We explain how Themis can
 measure discrimination and aid its debugging, describe a set of
 optimizations Themis uses to reduce test suite size, and demonstrate
 Themis' effectiveness on open-source software. Themis is open-source and
 all our evaluation data are available at http://fairness.cs.umass.edu/. See
 a video of Themis in action: https://youtu.be/brB8wkaUesY},
 comment      = {Demonstration paper},
 pages = {871--875},
 doi = {10.1145/3236024.3264590},
}