Bias on the Web
Online, Wednesday 19 May 2021 16:30 to 17:30
Bias on the Web
The Web is the most powerful communication medium and the largest public data repository that humankind has created.听Its content ranges from great reference sources such as Wikipedia to ugly fake news.听Indeed, social (digital) media is just an amplifying mirror of ourselves.听Hence, the main challenge of search engines and other websites that rely on web data is to assess the quality of such data.听However, as all people has their own biases, web content as well as our web interactions are tainted with many biases.听Data bias includes redundancy and spam, while interaction bias includes activity and presentation bias.听In addition, sometimes algorithms add bias, particularly in the 听context of search and recommendation systems.听As bias generates bias, we stress the importance of debiasing data as well as using the context and other techniques such as explore & exploit, to break the filter bubble.听The main goal of this talk is to make people aware of the different 听biases that affect all of us on the Web.听Awareness is the first step to be able to fight and reduce the vicious cycle of web bias.听For more details see the article of same title in Communications of ACM, June 2018.
闯辞颈苍:听听
Bio
Ricardo Baeza-Yates is Research Professor at the Roux Institute for听Experiential Research of Northeastern University.听Before, he was VP of Research at Yahoo Labs, based in Barcelona, Spain, and later in Sunnyvale, California, from 2006 to 2016.听He is co-author of the best-seller Modern Information Retrieval听textbook published by Addison-Wesley in 1999 and 2011 (2nd ed), that won the ASIST 2012 Book of the Year award.听From 2002 to 2004 he was elected to the Board of Governors of the IEEE Computer Society and between 2012 and 2016 was elected for the ACM Council.听Since 2010 is a founding member of the Chilean Academy of Engineering. In 2009 he was named ACM Fellow and in 2011 IEEE Fellow, among other awards and distinctions.听He obtained a Ph.D. in CS from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 1989, and his areas of expertise are web search and data mining,听information retrieval, bias on AI, data science and algorithms in general.