616 research outputs found
Bias 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 has
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. 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. For more details see the
article of same title in Communications of ACM, June 201
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