CONF Schelenz_AIES_2021/IDIAP The Theory, Practice, and Ethical Challenges of Designing a Diversity-Aware Platform for Social Relations Schelenz, Laura Bison, Ivano Busso, Matteo de Götzen, Amalia Gatica-Perez, Daniel Giunchiglia, Fausto Meegahapola, Lakmal Buddika Ruiz-Correa, Salvador EXTERNAL https://publications.idiap.ch/attachments/papers/2021/Schelenz_AIES_2021.pdf PUBLIC Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society 2021 ACM 11 https://doi.org/10.1145/3461702.3462595 doi Diversity-aware platform design is a paradigm that responds to the ethical challenges of existing social media platforms. Available platforms have been criticized for minimizing users’ autonomy, marginalizing minorities, and exploiting users’ data for profit maximization. This paper presents a design solution that centers the well-being of users. It presents the theory and practice of designing a diversity-aware platform for social relations. In this approach, the diversity of users is leveraged in a way that allows like-minded individuals to pursue similar interests or diverse individuals to complement each other in a complex activity. The end users of the envisioned platform are students, who participate in the design process. Diversity-aware platform design involves numerous steps, of which two are highlighted in this paper: 1) defining a framework and operationalizing the "diversity" of students, 2) collecting "diversity" data to build diversity-aware algorithms. The paper further reflects on the ethical challenges encountered during the design of a diversity-aware platform.