Hiruni Kegalle

PhD Candidate, RMIT University

Hiruni’s research aims to understand and help eliminate the unwarranted impact of recommender systems on side stakeholders who do not necessarily interact with the system.

Recommender Systems are crucial in helping users pick better options when a wide variety of choices are available. There is a growing concern for fairness in recommender systems as they are implemented in diverse areas, such as music, restaurants, social connections, and jobs. Researchers have explored fairness in recommenders in three main aspects. C-fairness or P-fairness focuses on fairness among different consumer or provider subgroups, like age or gender. C-P-fairness addresses fairness issues between consumers and providers. A relatively new concept called S-fairness deals with the fairness of recommendations on “side stakeholders”, who are not consumers or providers but are affected by suggestions, especially in platforms like Airbnb or Uber. C-fairness, P-fairness, and C-P-fairness are studied based on the actions of consumers and providers within the system. However, there is a notable gap in researching the fairness of recommendations for side stakeholders (S-fairness). Achieving S-fairness is challenging as interactions involving side stakeholders are not visible or reported in the system. Hiruni’s work aims to address this gap by developing a framework for evaluating the fairness of recommendations for multiple stakeholders, with a particular focus on side stakeholders. Her research explores novel methodologies for identifying and assessing the impacts of recommendations on side stakeholders. The initial case study focuses on a micro-mobility sharing service involving various stakeholders like e-scooter riders, other road users and organisations.

Hiruni is a scholarship recipient of the ARC Centre for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) and is supervised by Prof. Mark Sanderson, Prof. Flora Salim, Dr. Jeffrey Chan and Dr. Danula Hettiachchi.

References

2024

  1. E-Scooter Dynamics: Unveiling Rider Behaviours and Interactions with Road Users through Multi-Modal Data Analysis
    Hiruni KegalleDanula HettiachchiJeffrey ChanFlora Salim, and Mark Sanderson
    In Proceedings of the Augmented Humans International Conference 2024 (AHs ’24), 2024

2023

  1. Are footpaths encroached by shared e-scooters? Spatio-temporal Analysis of Micro-mobility Services
    Hiruni KegalleDanula HettiachchiJeffrey ChanFlora Salim, and Mark Sanderson
    In 2023 24th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM ’23), 2023