Copenhagen Workshop on Fairness
On August 17 and 18, 2023, the department hosted a workshop on fairness with a view towards insurance. Two days with discussions about ethics and accountability, and how to calculate discrimination-free insurance prices.
Across disciplines such as machine learning and actuarial science, fairness and anti-discrimination are emerging as important areas of research, not least due to interest from regulators across the globe. The goal of the workshop was to offer an opportunity for multidisciplinary discussions stimulated by talks from experienced researchers within the field.
Christian Furrer, Munir Hiabu, and Mogens Steffensen organized the workshop with support from Fynske Købstæders Fond and Danmarks Frie Forskningsfond.
The invited speakers for the first day were statistician Joshua Loftus from the London School of Economics, sociologist Liz McFall from the University of Edinburgh, actuarial scientists Fei Huang from UNSW Sydney and Andreas Tsanakas from Bayes Business School (London), and Matthias Fahrenwaldt from BaFin, the German Financial Supervisory Authority.
The first day was concluded by a roundtable discussion, moderated by Christian Furrer. The panellists – assisted by questions from the audience – discussed many aspects of fairness, ranging from the choice of statistical tools to regulatory requirements. One of the key points raised was that anti-discrimination might require the collection of additional individual data with far-reaching consequences for data protection and insurability.
On the second day of the workshop, there were additional talks by statistician Frederik Hytting Jørgensen and computer scientist Thomas Troels Hildebrandt – both from the University of Copenhagen – and actuarial scientist Mathias Lindholm from Stockholm University.
The organizers were happy with the outcome of the workshop:
- We received a lot of positive feedback. People went home with some answers - and with new questions about fairness in our field, says Christian Furrer.
