Bias in the Web

Speaker                                                                                                       Ricardo Baeza-Yates, CTO of NTENT, ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow  (An ACM Fellow is recognized as in top 1% of ACM members)

Agenda

6:30 – 7:00 audience arrives, registers, network, pizza

7:00 – 7:10 ACM announcements, pass mic to audience for DS hiring or announce other events, introduce speaker

7:10 – 8:30-ish presentation.  (9:00 is hard stop for all to be out)

Event Details

The Web is the most powerful communication medium and the largest public data repository that humankind has created. Its content ranges from great reference sources such as Wikipedia to ugly fake news. Indeed, social (digital) media is just an amplifying mirror of ourselves. Hence, the main challenge of search engines and other websites that rely on web data is to assess the quality of such data. However, as all people have their own biases, web content as well as our web interactions are tainted with many biases.

Data bias includes redundancy and spam, while interaction bias includes activity and presentation bias. In addition, sometimes algorithms add bias, particularly in the context of search and recommendation systems. As bias generates bias, we stress the importance of de-biasing data as well as using the context and other techniques such as explore & exploit, to break the filter bubble. The main goal of this talk is to make people aware of the different biases that affect all of us on the Web. Awareness is the first step to be able to fight and reduce the vicious cycle of bias.

Speaker Bio

Ricardo Baeza-Yates areas of expertise are web search and data mining, information retrieval, data science, and algorithms. He is CTO of NTENT, a semantic search technology company based in California, USA since 2016. Before, he was VP of Research at Yahoo Labs, based first in Barcelona, Spain, and later in Sunnyvale, California, from January 2006 to February 2016. He also is part time Professor at DTIC of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in Barcelona, Spain, as well as at DCC of Universidad de Chile in Santiago. 

Until 2004 he was Professor and founding director of the Center for Web Research at the later place. He obtained a Ph.D. in CS from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 1989. He is co-author of the best-seller Modern Information Retrieval textbook published by Addison-Wesley in 2011 (2nd edition), that won the ASIST 2012 Book of the Year award.

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. Since 2010 he 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.

Links

Personal website: <a>http://www.baeza.cl/</a&gt;

NTENT: http://www.ntent.com/

Modern Information Retrieval: <a>http://www.mir2ed.org/</a&gt;

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ricardobaezayates/

http://awards.acm.org/fellows    ACM’s most prestigious member grade recognizes the top 1% of ACM members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community.