In the current age of information overload, we rely increasingly on recommender systems that help us filter the information available down to those items that are interesting or relevant to us. Typically, these systems are based on general popularity of the items or similarity to items we have interacted with before. This approach works well in domains such as product or movie recommendation, but could be problematic in the context of news recommendation. Recently concerns have been raised over this approach inducing filter bubbles and echo chambers, where people primarily see items that are in line with their own views and preferences. Simultaneously, when done well, these news recommender systems could also be used to expose users to viewpoints different from what they are used to. This session will facilitate a discussion on what diversity in the context of news recommenders would look like.
See the answer to the first question. Our research is ongoing, and one of our main pillars is that we want to not only make this an academic exercise, but also something that could work in practice. For this we need insights from many academic disciplines, but also from industry and people actually using the recommender systems.
How will you deal with varying numbers of participants in your session?:We will start with a plenary session outlining the general problem space and our approach. After we will split up the group in smaller break-out sessions. It would be nice to have a rough idea of the group idea size; a break-out session should ideally have 3 - 6 people, but too many sessions is impractical.
What is the goal and/or outcome of your session?:Our goal is to discuss media diversity with a wider audience. The outcome of this will be two-fold: on the one hand we spread awareness of the importance of the issue and possible ways to tackle this. On the other hand we hope that the discussion will yield practical ideas and insights that can be incorporated in our own research.
As a postdoc at the Institute for Information Law of the University of Amsterdam, I specialize in ethics of technology with a focus on digital choice architectures, autonomy, and manipulation.
Project Researcher at the University of Amsterdam. Background in Artificial Intelligence, and currently mostly interested in the incorporation of human values in computer systems.