E-MEETING: Bias on the Web

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 web bias. Ricardo Baeza-Yates will discuss the different biases that affect all of us on the Web. 

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 debiasing data as well as using the context and other techniques such as explore & exploit, to break the filter bubble. 

Ricardo Baeza-Yates is, since June 2016, CTO of NTENT, a semantic search technology company based in California, USA. He is also the Director of Data Science Programs at Northeastern University, Silicon Valley campus, since August 2017. In 2009 he was named ACM Fellow and in 2011 IEEE Fellow for his contributions to Web search and data mining, information retrieval, data science and algorithm design.

This is a regular membership meeting of The Rotary Club of San Francisco, open to all Rotarians, visiting Rotarians, prospective members, and guests. The meeting is free, but you must register by 6 PM on Monday, April 13, 2020. Connection information will be provided only to those who register by the above deadline. For technical support, please contact Secretary Dora Dye before 10:30 AM on April 14, 2020.

Meeting Schedule:

12:00 Noon: Log in or dial in

12:15 PM: Meeting begins

1:30 PM: Meeting adjourns