Event Begins 1:15pm ends 2:30pm
Location: UTA Building, 1st floor, classroom 1.208
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Speaker: Ricardo Baeza-Yates (NTENT and Northeastern U.)
Title: Bias on the Web
Abstract: Our inherent human tendency of favoring one thing or opinion over another is reflected in every aspect of our lives, creating both latent and overt biases toward everything we see, hear, and do. Any remedy for bias must start with awareness that bias exists; for example, most mature societies raise awareness of social bias through affirmative-action programs, and, while awareness alone does not completely alleviate the problem, it helps guide us toward a solution. Bias on the Web reflects both societal and internal biases within ourselves, emerging in subtler ways. Increasing awareness of the potential effects imposed on us all through bias present in Web use and content is essential for us to consider and account for it in the design of Web systems that truly address people’s needs.
Bio: Dr. Ricardo Baeza-Yates, a Fellow of both ACM and IEEE, currently serves as CTO of NTENT, a search technology company. He served as VP of Research at Yahoo Labs from January 2006 to February 2016. Until 2005 he was the director of the Center for Web Research at the Department of Computer Science of the Engineering School of the University of Chile; and ICREA Professor and founder of the Web Science and Social Computing Research Group (formerly Web Research Group) at the Dept. of Information and Communication Technologies of Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. He maintains ties with both mentioned universities as a part-time professor. He also currently serves as Director of Computer Science Programs (part-time) of Northeastern University's Silicon Valley campus, and as an adjunct professor at the CS department of the University of Waterloo. His research interests includes algorithms and data structures, information retrieval, web search and data mining, and data science and visualization.