BIAS Co-Creation Events in Switzerland: Providing Input about Bias and Fairness   

The BIAS project is an interdisciplinary project which aims to measure and reduce stereotypes of the society in AI for the labour market. One part of this involves the so-called co-creation workshops, where stakeholders with very different background provide input to the project. In particular, two of these workshops have been organized in summer 2023 in each country.  

In Switzerland, the events were held in Olten, allowing participants from different cities to reach the venue. Stakeholders with different background including Human Resources (HR), legal, Artificial Intelligence (AI), philosophy and representatives of NGOs attended the workshop and thus provided their perspective for the different discussions. The technical BIAS partner BFH was supported by the Competence Centre for Diversity & Inclusion from the University of St. Gallen in organizing the events.  

The first workshop in June started with a panel discussion around the topic of diversity in the workplace and the risks and potential of using AI software. In particular, statistics about diversity in management positions in Switzerland presented as an introduction showed that there is room for improvement with regard to diversity. In four groups, the participants then discussed four different applicant profiles and developed motivation letters for them. In particular, the profiles differed in gender and place of birth, being in Switzerland or not. The discussion points and potential words transporting bias were documented and serve as a basis for the technical development in the project.  

The second workshop took place in early September and was devoted to the topic of the definition of fairness. In different exercises, the participants discussed about what fairness means in the recruiting process. In a second part, the requirements for the Debiaser were discussed. The Debiaser is the proof-of-concept technology developed by the BIAS project.  

In both cases, the workshops were followed up by a standing lunch, following up the interesting discussions from the workshop.