Ashwin Kumar, a PhD candidate at Washington University in St Louis, working on fair resource allocation and explainable AI, speaks with Brent Phillips, Pitt HexAI podcast producer, about the intricacies of fairness in AI systems and about balancing fairness and efficiency in complex systems like ride-sharing and healthcare resource distribution. The discussion dives into AI transparency, human-machine interaction, multi-agent reinforcement learning, and the evolving challenges in ensuring equitable outcomes in AI decision-making. The conversation connects AI's technical workings with real-world ethical concerns.