The School of Information is well represented at the 2026 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT), held June 25-28 at Le Centre Sheraton Montréal. Now in its ninth year, FAccT is the leading interdisciplinary venue for research on the social impacts of algorithmic systems, drawing scholars from computer science, law, the social sciences, and the humanities.
This year's program featured a strong showing from iSchool faculty and students, with work spanning how open-source AI is adopted in practice, how researchers navigate trust and accountability when using AI tools, and how fairness can be built into systems that affect real communities, alongside tutorial and workshop sessions on the power dynamics of AI supply chains.
First-year doctoral student Woohyeuk Lee was lead author of Open AI in the Wild: Adoption and Adaptation of Open Models on r/LocalLLaMA, co-authored with Associate Professor James Howison, Assistant Professor Min Kyung Lee, and Assistant Professor Hanlin Li. The paper offers an empirical look at how an active online community adopts and adapts open foundation models, contributing to a growing body of iSchool research on open-source AI. Attending FAccT for the first time, Lee studies the use of and practices around open-source foundation models and is advised by Min Kyung Lee and Hanlin Li.
Assistant Professor David Gray Widder, who joined the iSchool in December 2025, had an especially active conference. He was a co-author on Reimagining Open Source and Openness in AI: Co-Creating Responsible Technological Futures, a large collaborative effort examining what genuine openness in AI could look like. Widder also helped lead two interactive sessions: a tutorial, Studying, Governing, Building and Evaluating AI Supply Chains, and a CRAFT session, Visioning Resistance: A CRAFTing Workshop on Adversarial Responses to AI. Widder's research focuses on questions of responsibility and power across the AI supply chain.
Professor Matt Lease presented two papers at the conference. How Researchers Navigate Accountability, Transparency, and Trust When Using AI Tools in Early-Stage Research: A Think-Aloud Study was led by former iSchool postdoctoral fellow Sanjana Gautam, with doctoral students Houjiang Liu and Yujin Choi. It examines how researchers themselves reason about trust and accountability when incorporating AI into their work. Fairness-Aware Multi-Group Target Detection in Online Discussion, with Soumyajit Gupta and Maria De-Arteaga, develops methods for detecting harmful content directed at multiple groups while accounting for fairness across them. Lease also shared companion podcasts, slides, and preprints for both papers.
Papers by iSchool and UT-affiliated authors, all available in the conference proceedings:
- Woohyeuk Lee, James Howison, Min Kyung Lee, and Hanlin Li. Open AI in the Wild: Adoption and Adaptation of Open Models on r/LocalLLaMA.
- Genevieve Smith, et al. (including Min Kyung Lee, Woohyeuk Lee, and David Gray Widder). Reimagining Open Source and Openness in AI: Co-Creating Responsible Technological Futures.
- Sanjana Gautam, Houjiang Liu, Yujin Choi, and Matthew Lease. How Researchers Navigate Accountability, Transparency, and Trust When Using AI Tools in Early-Stage Research: A Think-Aloud Study.
- Soumyajit Gupta, Maria De-Arteaga, and Matthew Lease. Fairness-Aware Multi-Group Target Detection in Online Discussion.
Sessions:
- Studying, Governing, Building and Evaluating AI Supply Chains (Tutorial), with Aspen Hopkins, David Gray Widder, and Jatinder Singh.
- Visioning Resistance: A CRAFTing Workshop on Adversarial Responses to AI (CRAFT), with Alicia DeVrio, Inha Cha, Shira Abramovich, Audrey Le Meur, Ali Alkhatib, and David Gray Widder.
The 2026 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency was held June 25-28, 2026, in Montréal, Canada. Full proceedings are available through the ACM Digital Library.