AIMICI Presents at ACM FAccT

On June 25, 2025, AIMICI Director Will Tao will be co-presenting the tutorial “Gaming the System”: How gaming overshadows notice obligations in automated decision-making processes along with Jennifer Raso and Alexandra Sinclair at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency 2026 in Montreal, Canada.

This tutorial gives a detailed account of how the concept of ‘gaming’−a touchstone of computer science−has been adopted into digital administration and the upshots for public law. Increasingly, when applicants ask governments for basic information about the rules and algorithms that will be used in automated decision-making, they are told that they cannot access these details for fear that they will use them to ‘game the system’.

The tutorial will reveal how this shifting approach to administrative decision-making, one that views hearing processes as games to be won rather than as eligibility assessment mechanisms, is a subtle but significant transformation. The tutorial will explore these effects and theorize their implications for public law and for fair decisions more broadly. The speakers will draw on empirical evidence gathered through their qualitative studies of, and legal practice involving, digitalized immigration administration in the United Kingdom and Canada to illustrate how the risk of gaming increasingly impedes access to information relevant to administrative hearings.