Please accept our apologies in case of multiple receptions.
Please send to interested colleagues and students.
Call for Papers
Second International Workshop on Algorithmic Bias in Search and Recommendation (Bias 2021)
to be held as part of the 43rd European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2021)
Workshop: April 1, 2021 (tbc) - ONLINE EVENT
https://biasinrecsys.github.io/ecir2021/
-----------------------------------------------------
Important Dates
-----------------------------------------------------
Submissions: January 4, 2021
Notifications: February 8, 2021
Camera-Ready Contributions: March 1, 2021
Workshop: April 1, 2021 (tbc) - ONLINE EVENT
All deadlines are 11:59pm, AoE time (Anywhere on Earth).
------------------------------------------------------
Workshop Aims and Scope
------------------------------------------------------
Both search and recommendation algorithms provide a user with a ranking that aims to match their needs and interests. Despite the (non) personalized perspective characterizing each class of algorithms, both learn patterns from historical data, which conveys biases in terms of imbalances and inequalities. In most cases, the trained models and, by extension, the final ranking, unfortunately strengthen these biases in the learned patterns. When a bias impacts on human beings as individuals or as groups with certain legally protected characteristics (e.g., race, gender), the inequalities reinforced by search and recommendation algorithms lead to severe societal consequences like discrimination and unfairness. Challenges that arise in the real-world applications are focused, among others, on controlling the effects generated by popularity bias to improve the user's perceived quality of the results, supporting consumers and providers with fair rankings, and transparently explaining why a model provides a given (less) biased result. Hence, being able to detect, measure, characterize, and mitigate bias while keeping high effectiveness is a prominent and timely challenge. BIAS 2021 will be the ECIR's workshop aimed at collecting new contributions in this emerging field and providing a common ground for interested researchers and practitioners. Specifically, BIAS 2021 will be the second edition of this dedicated event at ECIR, coming after a very successful 2020 delivering. Given the growing interest of the community in these topics, we expect that this workshop will be more and more of interest, with a stronger outcome and a wider community dialog.
--------------------------------------------------------
Workshop Keywords
--------------------------------------------------------
Information Retrieval · Recommender Systems · Data and Algorithmic Bias · Fairness
-------------------------------------------------------
Workshop Topics
-------------------------------------------------------
The workshop welcomes contributions in all topics related to algorithmic bias and fairness in search and recommendation, focused (but not limited) to:
-------------------------------------------------------
Submission Details
-------------------------------------------------------
All submissions must be written in English. Authors should consult ECIR paper guidelines and Fuhr’s guide to avoid common IR evaluation mistakes, for the preparation of their papers. Authors should consult Springer’s authors’ guidelines and use their proceedings templates, either LaTeX or Word. Papers should be submitted as PDF files to https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=bias2021. Please be aware of the fact that at least one author per paper needs to register for the workshop and attend the workshop to present the work.
We will consider three different submission types:
Submissions should not exceed the indicated number of pages, including any diagrams and references.
The reviewing process will be coordinated by the organizers. Each paper will receive two reviews external to the organizing committee and one review internal to it, according to reviewers' expertise.
The accepted papers and the material generated during the meeting will be available on the workshop website. The workshop proceedings will be also published in a volume, whose details will be given soon, and indexed on DBLP and Scopus. Authors of selected papers may be invited to submit an extended version in a journal special issue.
We expect authors, PC, and the organizing committee to adhere to the ACM’s Conflict of Interest Policy and the ACM’s Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.
----------------------------------------------------------
Attending
----------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------
Workshop Chairs
---------------------------------------------------------
Ludovico Boratto
https://www.ludovicoboratto.com/
Data Science and Big Data Analytics Research Group
Eurecat - Centre Tecnològic de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain
Email: ludovico.boratto@acm.org
Stefano Faralli
Unitelma Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy
Email: stefano.faralli@unitelmasapienza.it
Mirko Marras
Digital Vocation, Education and Training (D-VET) Laboratory & Machine Learning for Education (ML4ED) Laboratory
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland
Email: mirko.marras@epfl.ch
Giovanni Stilo
Department of Information Engineering, Computer Science and Mathematics
University of L’Aquila, L’Aquila, Italy
Email: giovanni.stilo@univaq.it
-----------------------------------------------------------
Contacts
-----------------------------------------------------------
For general enquiries on the workshop, please send an email to ludovico.boratto@acm.org, stefano.faralli@unitelmasapienza.it, mirko.marras@epfl.ch, and giovanni.stilo@univaq.it.