September 30, 2020 6:00PM The Mid-America Club

Ricardo Baeza-Yates is Director of Data Science Programs at Northeastern University, Silicon Valley campus, since 2017. He is also part-time professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and Universidad de Chile in Santiago. He is co-author of the best-selling Modern Information Retrieval textbook, winner of the ASIST 2012 Book of the Year. Since 2010 is a founding member of the Chilean Academy of Engineering. He obtained a Ph.D. in CS from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 1989, and his areas of expertise are web search and data mining, information retrieval, data science and algorithms.

A Mirror Showing Ourselves

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. As all people have their own biases, however, web content, as well as our web interactions, have become tainted with many biases.

Data bias includes redundancy and spam, while interaction bias involves activity and presentational biases. Additionally, 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.

Join Us in Popping the Bubble

In this talk, Dr. Baezas-Yates will 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.

About Northeastern University

Northeastern University’s Data Science on Demand is a series of short courses designed to give participants in-depth education on topics in data science through a limited engagement format. Our students will have instructors that are prominent in the field of computer and data science, and come from an industry located in Silicon Valley. Data Science is an essential key to anyone looking for career development in the tech industry. It is used to meet the growing client needs and demands in many of today’s businesses. Data Science on Demand will not only help you stay on top of latest trends but also grow your professional network by learning side by side with like-minded Silicon Valley professionals.