On June 8, 2017, TU Wien Informatics will be welcoming Ricardo Baeza-Yates for the 2017 Vienna Gödel Lecture. Baeza-Yates is former Yahoo Labs Vice-president and currently CTO of NTENT, a semantic search company in South California. The Chilean-Spanish computer scientist will talk about the “Bias in the Web.”

Digital Media Mirrors Ourselves

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.

The Vicious Circle of Bias

Data bias includes redundancy and spam, while interaction bias includes activity and presentation bias. Also, sometimes algorithms add bias, particularly in the context of search and recommendation systems. 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. 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 circle of bias.  

About Ricardo Baeza-Yates

Ricardo Baeza-Yates is a Chilean-Spanish computer scientist and currently CTO of NTENT, a semantic search company in Carlsbad, California. He is also Director of Graduate Data Science Programs (part-time) of Northeastern University, Silicon Valley campus. Until February 2016, he was VP of Research for Yahoo! Labs. His research interests include algorithms and data structures, information retrieval, web search, data mining, and data science and visualization.

Program

17:30 Welcome: Uwe Egly, member of the Dean’s team, TU Wien Informatics

17:45 Bias in the Web, Ricardo Baeza-Yates, NTENT

Chair: Stefan Szeider, Head of Research Unit Algorithms and Complexity, TU Wien Informatics