In addition to the Poster Session, the Data Science Day featured a diverse programme of presentations. It included a presentation by Women in AI Austria, a local non-profit organisation committed to reducing the gender gap in artificial intelligence by empowering women and promoting gender diversity across algorithm design and data practices. Entrepreneurship @ Uni Vienna contributed insights from the innovation labs, which support students and early-career researchers in developing entrepreneurial skills through an accelerated venture-creation process.

The programme concluded in with a keynote by Francesco Bonchi, who presented recent advances in distributional max-min fairness, demonstrating how randomisation can enhance individual fairness in algorithmic decision-making and its relevance across core computational problems such as matching, ranking, and shortest-path queries. Francesco Bonchi is the Co-Founder and Research Director of CENTAI in Turin and holds additional research and advisory roles across Europe, bringing extensive expertise at the intersection of artificial intelligence and society.

Finally, we would like to thank Entrepreneurship @ Uni Vienna for their support. Their contribution played an important role of making the event a success and helped strengthen the data science community. We look forward to continuing our collaboration in the future.

Photos: Petra Schönfelder

18:00–21:00 Keynote & Reception

Francesco Bonchi: Randomization for Algorithmic Fairness

Abstract:

Algorithmic decision-making has become pervasive in high-stakes domains such as health, education, and employment. This widespread adoption raises crucial concerns about the fairness of the algorithms adopted. In this talk, I will delve into a recent research line that explores individual fairness in combinatorial optimization problems, where many valid solutions may exist to a given problem instance. Our proposal, named distributional max-min fairness, leverages the power of randomization to maximize the expected satisfaction of the most disadvantaged individuals. The talk will highlight applications across fundamental algorithmic challenges, including matching, ranking, and shortest-path queries.

Moderation: Yllka Velaj

followed by an Evening Reception

21:00 Wrap Up

About Francesco Bonchi

Francesco Bonchi is the Co-Founder and Research Director at CENTAI (Center for Artificial Intelligence) in Turin, Italy. He also holds a part-time position at Eurecat (Technological Center of Catalunya) in Barcelona, Spain. He also serves on the AI task-force of the Italian Government and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Anti-Financial Crime Digital Hub in Turin. Previously, he was the Scientific Director at the ISI Foundation in Turin and the Director of Research at Yahoo Labs in Barcelona.

Dr. Bonchi's recent research interests encompass algorithms and learning on complex networks, fair and explainable AI, and the broader domain of trustworthiness and ethical aspects of data science and AI. He has authored over 250 publications in these fields, earning several Best Paper Awards, including at the prestigious World Wide Web Conference 2022. Additionally, he holds 9 US patents, which earned him the 2013 Yahoo Master Inventor Award.

Dr. Bonchi has been the General Co-Chair of notable conferences such as ACM SIGKDD 2024, the 2023 European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD 2023), and the 5th IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA 2018). He has also been PC Chair of numerous international conferences, including The Web Conf (2026), ECML PKDD (2010 and 2018), the 16th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM 2016), the 28th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (HT 2017), and the 6th IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA 2019). He is a member of the Steering Committee of ECML PKDD and IEEE DSAA, and serves on the editorial boards of several journals.

More information at: www.francescobonchi.com

About Women in AI Austria

As a local and non-profit organisation ‘Women in Artifical Intelligence Austria’, they are part of the global community of female experts and driving forces in AI and its impact on society. Their goal is to close the gender gap in the field of artificial intelligence by empowering women and raising awareness of the need for gender diversity in AI; both in the programming of algorithms and in the selection and preparation of data sets. Learn more about Women in AI Austria here: www.womeninai.at