Introduction to The Special Section on Bias and Fairness in AI

Fairness in Artificial Intelligence rightfully receives a lot of attention these days. Many life-impacting decisions are being partially automated, including health-care resource planning decisions, insurance and credit risk predictions, recidivism predictions, etc. Much of work appearing on this topic within the Data Mining, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence community is focused on technological aspects. Nevertheless, fairness is much wider than this as it lies at the intersection of philosophy, ethics, legislation, and practical perspectives. Therefore, to fill this gap and bring together scholars of these disciplines working on fairness, the first workshop on Bias and Fairness in AI was held online on September 18, 2020 at the ECML-PKDD 2020 conference. This special section includes six articles presenting different perspectives on bias and fairness from different angles.