Workshop on Learning and Evaluating Recommendations with Impressions (LERI)

Recommender systems typically rely on past user interactions as the primary source of information for making predictions. However, although highly informative, past user interactions are strongly biased. Impressions, on the other hand, are a new source of information that indicate the items displayed on screen when the user interacted (or not) with them, and have the potential to impact the field of recommender systems in several ways. Early research on impressions was constrained by the limited availability of public datasets, but this is rapidly changing and, as a consequence, interest in impressions has increased. Impressions present new research questions and opportunities, but also bring new challenges. Several works propose to use impressions as part of recommender models in various ways and discuss their information content. Others explore their potential in off-policy-estimation and reinforcement learning. Overall, the interest of the community is growing, but efforts in this direction remain disconnected. Therefore, we believe that a workshop would be useful in bringing the community together

Problematic Advertising and its Disparate Exposure on Facebook

Targeted advertising remains an important part of the free web browsing experience, where advertisers' targeting and personalization algorithms together find the most relevant audience for millions of ads every day. However, given the wide use of advertising, this also enables using ads as a vehicle for problematic content, such as scams or clickbait. Recent work that explores people's sentiments toward online ads, and the impacts of these ads on people's online experiences, has found evidence that online ads can indeed be problematic. Further, there is the potential for personalization to aid the delivery of such ads, even when the advertiser targets with low specificity. In this paper, we study Facebook -- one of the internet's largest ad platforms -- and investigate key gaps in our understanding of problematic online advertising: (a) What categories of ads do people find problematic? (b) Are there disparities in the distribution of problematic ads to viewers? and if so, (c) Who is responsible -- advertisers or advertising platforms? To answer these questions, we empirically measure a diverse sample of user experiences with Facebook ads via a 3-month longitudinal panel. We categorize over 32,000 ads collected from this panel ($n=132$); and survey participants' sentiments toward their own ads to identify four categories of problematic ads. Statistically modeling the distribution of problematic ads across demographics, we find that older people and minority groups are especially likely to be shown such ads. Further, given that 22% of problematic ads had no specific targeting from advertisers, we infer that ad delivery algorithms (advertising platforms themselves) played a significant role in the biased distribution of these ads.Comment: Accepted to USENIX Security 202

User Interaction with Online Advertisements: Temporal Modeling and Optimization of Ads Placement

We consider an online advertisement system and focus on the impact of user interaction and response to targeted advertising campaigns. We analytically model the system dynamics accounting for the user behavior and devise strategies to maximize a relevant metric called click-through-intensity (CTI), defined as the number of clicks per time unit. With respect to the traditional click-through-rate (CTR) metric, CTI better captures the success of advertisements for services that the users may access several times, making multiple purchases or subscriptions. Examples include advertising of on-line games or airplane tickets. The model we develop is validated through traces of real advertising systems and allows us to optimize CTI under different scenarios depending on the nature of ad delivery and of the information available at the system. Experimental results show that our approach can increase the revenue of an ad campaign, even when user’s behavior can only be estimated

Spartan Daily, September 5, 2007

Volume 129, Issue 5https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/10377/thumbnail.jp

Factors that Influence Parents’ Meta-Emotion Approaches: Implications for Families

This quantitative study investigated the concept of meta-emotion by examining factors that were associated with specific types of meta-emotion approaches parents used. The main variables included parental stress, outside support, education levels. Other variables considered were number of children in the family, age of children, and children’s gender. The concept of meta-emotion as well as the inclusion of these variables were important to investigate to further understand the factors that influenced parents’ thoughts and reactions to their children’s emotions and emotional responses. It was determined that 143 participants were needed. These participants were gathered by emails sent to students and faculty at Texas Woman’s University. Participants were also gathered by dispersing flyers advertising the study in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas metroplex. Individuals who agreed to participate gave consent and then completed the anonymous online questionnaires through PsychData. Results yielded that parental stress was the only significant predictor of meta-emotion approaches

Talking theatre: an audience development programme for regional Queensland and the Northern Territory 2004-2006

Talking Theatre was a three year research project funded by the Australian Research Council, NARPACA, Arts Queensland, Arts Northern Territory, and the Queensland University of Technology. Talking Theatre sought to build new audiences both in the short and long term for the fourteen regional performing arts centres associated with the project. The research endeavoured to develop a profile of non-theatregoers in regional areas, to understand their reasons for non-attendance, and to discover their reactions to live performances, and to the performing arts centres who presented them

A guide to finance for Social Enterprises in South Africa

The global economic crisis and its aftermath deepen the challenge of decent employment creation. The Global Jobs Pact developed in response to the crisis sets out a framework that ensures linkages between social progress and economic development. In this context, there is increasing interest in the social economy as a way to combine social and economic goals. The Ouagadougou Symposium on the Global Jobs Pact as it relates to Africa included a recommendation to increase support to the social economy. A regional conference in October 2009 on the social economy as a response to the economic crisis in Africa defined the social economy as "a concept designating enterprises and organizations, in particular cooperatives, mutual benefit societies, associations, foundations and social enterprises, which have the specific feature of producing goods, services and knowledge while pursuing both economic and social aims and fostering solidarity.

Getting attention for a ceramic art exhibition: A Case study of a nonprofit’s promotional campaign

A participant-observation case study of a promotional campaign developed and implemented for a temporary, nonprofit ceramic art exhibition. The subject is introduced through a review of both theoretical and practical research examples centered on marketing and public relations for arts and cultural attractions. The present study offers a descriptive and evaluative analysis of the campaign\u27s promotional strategies and tactics. Strategies discussed include promotional objectives, prospective audiences, assessment of available resources, and scheduling and implementation. The tactics include direct mail and email delivery of press releases, promotional materials, and the use of social media. Findings demonstrate that publicity generated primarily was derived from a combination of personalized email communications and timely, unique press releases