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Objective estimators of multimedia quality are often judged by comparing estimates with subjective "truth data," most often via Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) or mean-squared error (MSE). But subjective test results contain noise, so…
Participatory budgeting, as a paradigm for democratic innovations, engages citizens in the distribution of a public budget to projects, which they propose and vote for implementation. So far, voting algorithms have been proposed and studied…
Online data has the potential to transform how researchers and companies produce election forecasts. Social media surveys, online panels and even comments scraped from the internet can offer valuable insights into political preferences.…
This work focuses on the nature of visibility in societies where the behaviours of humans and algorithms influence each other - termed algorithmically infused societies. We propose a quantitative measure of visibility, with implications and…
Information availability affects people's behavior and perception of the world. Notably, people rely on search engines to satisfy their need for information. Search engines deliver results relevant to user requests usually without being or…
Version identification (VI) systems now offer accurate and scalable solutions for detecting different renditions of a musical composition, allowing the use of these systems in industrial applications and throughout the wider music…
The aggregation of multiple opinions plays a crucial role in decision-making, such as in hiring and loan review, and in labeling data for supervised learning. Although majority voting and existing opinion aggregation models are effective…
In recent studies of political decision-making, apparently anomalous behavior has been observed on the part of voters, in which negative information about a candidate strengthens, rather than weakens, a prior positive opinion about the…
Popularity bias is a well-known issue in recommender systems where few popular items are over-represented in the input data, while majority of other less popular items are under-represented. This disparate representation often leads to bias…
Instrumental variable based estimation of a causal effect has emerged as a standard approach to mitigate confounding bias in the social sciences and epidemiology, where conducting randomized experiments can be too costly or impossible.…
Studies investigating the causal effects of spatially varying exposures on outcomes often rely on observational and spatially indexed data. A prevalent challenge is unmeasured spatial confounding, where an unobserved spatially varying…
Online platforms regularly conduct randomized experiments to understand how changes to the platform causally affect various outcomes of interest. However, experimentation on online platforms has been criticized for having, among other…
A central role in shaping the experience of users online is played by recommendation algorithms. On the one hand they help retrieving content that best suits users taste, but on the other hand they may give rise to the so called "filter…
When learning to rank from user interactions, search and recommender systems must address biases in user behavior to provide a high-quality ranking. One type of bias that has recently been studied in the ranking literature is when sensitive…
The effect of user bias in fact-checking has not been explored extensively from a user-experience perspective. We estimate the user bias as a function of the user's perceived reputation of the news sources (e.g., a user with liberal beliefs…
Individual and social biases undermine the effectiveness of human advisers by inducing judgment errors which can disadvantage protected groups. In this paper, we study the influence these biases can have in the pervasive problem of fake…
While popularity bias is recognized to play a crucial role in recommmender (and other ranking-based) systems, detailed analysis of its impact on collective user welfare has largely been lacking. We propose and theoretically analyze a…
How does the visual design of digital platforms impact user behavior and the resulting environment? A body of work suggests that introducing social signals to content can increase both the inequality and unpredictability of its success, but…
The diffusion of opinions in Social Networks is a relevant process for adopting positions and attracting potential voters in political campaigns. Opinion polarization, bias, targeted diffusion, and the radicalization of postures are key…
Analyses of voting algorithms often overlook informational externalities shaping individual votes. For example, pre-polling information often skews voters towards candidates who may not be their top choice, but who they believe would be a…