Georgina Curto

Georgina Curto, Svetlana Kiritchenko, Isar Nejadgholi et al.

The criminalization of poverty has been widely denounced as a collective bias against the most vulnerable. NGOs and international organizations claim that the poor are blamed for their situation, are more often associated with criminal offenses than the wealthy strata of society and even incur criminal offenses simply as a result of being poor. While no evidence has been found in the literature that correlates poverty and overall criminality rates, this paper offers evidence of a collective belief that associates both concepts. This brief report measures the societal bias that correlates criminality with the poor, as compared to the rich, by using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques in Twitter. The paper quantifies the level of crime-poverty bias in a panel of eight different English-speaking countries. The regional differences in the association between crime and poverty cannot be justified based on different levels of inequality or unemployment, which the literature correlates to property crimes. The variation in the observed rates of crime-poverty bias for different geographic locations could be influenced by cultural factors and the tendency to overestimate the equality of opportunities and social mobility in specific countries. These results have consequences for policy-making and open a new path of research for poverty mitigation with the focus not only on the poor but on society as a whole. Acting on the collective bias against the poor would facilitate the approval of poverty reduction policies, as well as the restoration of the dignity of the persons affected.

Georgina Curto, Flavio Comim

This paper clarifies why bias cannot be completely mitigated in Machine Learning (ML) and proposes an end-to-end methodology to translate the ethical principle of justice and fairness into the practice of ML development as an ongoing agreement with stakeholders. The pro-ethical iterative process presented in the paper aims to challenge asymmetric power dynamics in the fairness decision making within ML design and support ML development teams to identify, mitigate and monitor bias at each step of ML systems development. The process also provides guidance on how to explain the always imperfect trade-offs in terms of bias to users.

Alba Aguilera, Georgina Curto, Nardine Osman et al.

Agent-based simulations have an untapped potential to inform social policies on urgent human development challenges in a non-invasive way, before these are implemented in real-world populations. This paper responds to the request from non-profit and governmental organizations to evaluate policies under discussion to improve equity in health care services for people experiencing homelessness (PEH) in the city of Barcelona. With this goal, we integrate the conceptual framework of the capability approach (CA), which is explicitly designed to promote and assess human well-being, to model and evaluate the behaviour of agents who represent PEH and social workers. We define a reinforcement learning environment where agents aim to restore their central human capabilities, under existing environmental and legal constraints. We use Bayesian inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) to calibrate profile-dependent behavioural parameters in PEH agents, modeling the degree of trust and engagement with social workers, which is reportedly a key element for the success of the policies in scope. Our results open a path to mitigate health inequity by building relationships of trust between social service workers and PEH.

Piera Riccio, Georgina Curto, Thomas Hofmann et al.

At a time when the influence of generative Artificial Intelligence on visual arts is a highly debated topic, we raise the attention towards a more subtle phenomenon: the algorithmic censorship of artistic nudity online. We analyze the performance of three "Not-Safe-For-Work'' image classifiers on artistic nudity, and empirically uncover the existence of a gender and a stylistic bias, as well as evident technical limitations, especially when only considering visual information. Hence, we propose a multi-modal zero-shot classification approach that improves artistic nudity classification. From our research, we draw several implications that we hope will inform future research on this topic.

Alba Aguilera, Nieves Montes, Georgina Curto et al.

In the last decades, there has been a deceleration in the rates of poverty reduction, suggesting that traditional redistributive approaches to poverty mitigation could be losing effectiveness, and alternative insights to advance the number one UN Sustainable Development Goal are required. The criminalization of poor people has been denounced by several NGOs, and an increasing number of voices suggest that discrimination against the poor (a phenomenon known as \emph{aporophobia}) could be an impediment to mitigating poverty. In this paper, we present the novel Aporophobia Agent-Based Model (AABM) to provide evidence of the correlation between aporophobia and poverty computationally. We present our use case built with real-world demographic data and poverty-mitigation public policies (either enforced or under parliamentary discussion) for the city of Barcelona. We classify policies as discriminatory or non-discriminatory against the poor, with the support of specialized NGOs, and we observe the results in the AABM in terms of the impact on wealth inequality. The simulation provides evidence of the relationship between aporophobia and the increase of wealth inequality levels, paving the way for a new generation of poverty reduction policies that act on discrimination and tackle poverty as a societal problem (not only a problem of the poor).

Pierre Le Coz, Jia An Liu, Debarun Bhattacharjya et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being adopted in high-stakes domains. Their capacity to process vast amounts of unstructured data, explore flexible scenarios, and handle a diversity of contextual factors can make them uniquely suited to provide new insights for the complexity of social policymaking. This article evaluates whether LLMs' are aligned with domain experts (and among themselves) to inform social policymaking on the subject of homelessness alleviation - a challenge affecting over 150 million people worldwide. We develop a novel benchmark comprised of decision scenarios with policy choices across four geographies (South Bend, USA; Barcelona, Spain; Johannesburg, South Africa; Macau SAR, China). The policies in scope are grounded in the conceptual framework of the Capability Approach for human development. We also present an automated pipeline that connects the benchmarked policies to an agent-based model, and we explore the social impact of the recommended policies through simulated social scenarios. The paper results reveal promising potential to leverage LLMs for social policy making. If responsible guardrails and contextual calibrations are introduced in collaboration with local domain experts, LLMs can provide humans with valuable insights, in the form of alternative policies at scale.

Georgina Curto, Svetlana Kiritchenko, Muhammad Hammad Fahim Siddiqui et al.

Eradicating poverty is the first goal in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. However, aporophobia -- the societal bias against people living in poverty -- constitutes a major obstacle to designing, approving and implementing poverty-mitigation policies. This work presents an initial step towards operationalizing the concept of aporophobia to identify and track harmful beliefs and discriminative actions against poor people on social media. In close collaboration with non-profits and governmental organizations, we conduct data collection and exploration. Then we manually annotate a corpus of English tweets from five world regions for the presence of (1) direct expressions of aporophobia, and (2) statements referring to or criticizing aporophobic views or actions of others, to comprehensively characterize the social media discourse related to bias and discrimination against the poor. Based on the annotated data, we devise a taxonomy of categories of aporophobic attitudes and actions expressed through speech on social media. Finally, we train several classifiers and identify the main challenges for automatic detection of aporophobia in social networks. This work paves the way towards identifying, tracking, and mitigating aporophobic views on social media at scale.

Jonathan A. Karr, Benjamin F. Herbst, Ting Hua et al.

Homelessness is a persistent social challenge, impacting millions worldwide. Over 770,000 people experienced homelessness in the U.S. in 2024. Social stigmatization is a significant barrier to alleviation, shifting public perception, and influencing policymaking. Given that online and city council discourse reflect and influence part of public opinion, it provides valuable insights to identify and track social biases. This research contributes to alleviating homelessness by acting on public opinion. It introduces novel methods, building on natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLMs), to identify and measure PEH social bias expressed in digital spaces. We present a new, manually-annotated multi-modal dataset compiled from Reddit, X (formerly Twitter), news articles, and city council meeting minutes across 10 U.S. cities. This unique dataset provides evidence of the typologies of homelessness bias described in the literature. In order to scale up and automate the detection of homelessness bias online, we evaluate LLMs as classifiers. We applied both zero-shot and few-shot classification techniques to this data. We utilized local LLMs (Llama 3.2 3B Instruct, Qwen 2.5 7B Instruct, and Phi4 Instruct Mini) as well as closed-source API models (GPT-4.1, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Grok-4). Our findings reveal that although there are significant inconsistencies in local LLM zero-shot classification, the in-context learning classification scores of local LLMs approach the classification scores of closed-source LLMs. Furthermore, LLMs outperform BERT when averaging across all categories. This work aims to raise awareness about the pervasive bias against PEH, develop new indicators to inform policy, and ultimately enhance the fairness and ethical application of Generative AI technologies.

Adrian Arnaiz-Rodriguez, Georgina Curto, Nuria Oliver

Social networks contribute to the distribution of social capital, defined as the relationships, norms of trust and reciprocity within a community or society that facilitate cooperation and collective action. Therefore, better positioned members in a social network benefit from faster access to diverse information and higher influence on information dissemination. A variety of methods have been proposed in the literature to measure social capital at an individual level. However, there is a lack of methods to quantify social capital at a group level, which is particularly important when the groups are defined on the grounds of protected attributes. To fill this gap, we propose to measure the social capital of a group of nodes by means of the effective resistance and emphasize the importance of considering the entire network topology. Grounded in spectral graph theory, we introduce three effective resistance-based measures of group social capital, namely group isolation, group diameter and group control, where the groups are defined according to the value of a protected attribute. We denote the social capital disparity among different groups in a network as structural group unfairness, and propose to mitigate it by means of a budgeted edge augmentation heuristic that systematically increases the social capital of the most disadvantaged group. In experiments on real-world networks, we uncover significant levels of structural group unfairness when using gender as the protected attribute, with females being the most disadvantaged group in comparison to males. We also illustrate how our proposed edge augmentation approach is able to not only effectively mitigate the structural group unfairness but also increase the social capital of all groups in the network.