Related papers: Algorithms vs. Peers: Shaping Engagement with Nove…

Smart recommendation algorithms have revolutionized content delivery and improved efficiency across various domains. However, concerns about user agency arise from the algorithms' inherent opacity (information asymmetry) and one-way output…

Social media enables users to publish, disseminate, and access information easily. The downside is that it has fewer gatekeepers of what content is allowed to enter public circulation than the traditional media. In this paper, we present…

Social advertising uses information about consumers' peers, including peer affiliations with a brand, product, organization, etc., to target ads and contextualize their display. This approach can increase ad efficacy for two main reasons:…

Optimizing outcomes for multiple stakeholders in recommender systems has historically focused on algorithmic interventions, such as developing multi-objective models or re-ranking results from existing algorithms. However, structural…

Commencing as a photo-sharing platform, Instagram has since become multifaceted, accommodating diverse art forms, with poetry emerging as a prominent one. However, the academic understanding of Instagram's poetry community is limited, yet…

Emerging short-video platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and ShareChat present unique challenges for recommender systems, primarily originating from a continuous stream of new content. ShareChat alone receives approximately 2 million…

Our network of acquaintances determines how we get exposed to ideas, products, or cultural artworks (books, music, movies, etc.). Though this principle is part of our common sense, little is known about the specific pathways through which…

The remarkable ecological success of humans is often attributed to our ability to develop complex cultural artefacts that enable us to cope with environmental challenges. The evolution of complex culture (cumulative cultural evolution) is…

Modern technology has drastically changed the way we interact and consume information. For example, online social platforms allow for seamless communication exchanges at an unprecedented scale. However, we are still bounded by cognitive and…

When people prefer to coordinate their behaviors with their friends -- e.g., choosing whether to adopt a new technology, to protest against a government, to attend university -- divisions within a social network can sustain different…

When we search online for content, we are constantly exposed to rankings. For example, web search results are presented as a ranking, and online bookstores often show us lists of best-selling books. While popularity-based ranking algorithms…

Network-based people recommendation algorithms are widely employed on the Web to suggest new connections in social media or professional platforms. While such recommendations bring people together, the feedback loop between the algorithms…

Social media platforms are ecosystems in which many decisions are constantly made for the benefit of the creators in order to maximize engagement, which leads to a maximization of income. The decisions, ranging from collaboration to public…

Polarization is a troubling phenomenon that can lead to societal divisions and hurt the democratic process. It is therefore important to develop methods to reduce it. We propose an algorithmic solution to the problem of reducing…

WeChat is the largest social instant messaging platform in China, with 1.1 billion monthly active users. "Top Stories" is a novel friend-enhanced recommendation engine in WeChat, in which users can read articles based on preferences of both…

Ensuring fair outcomes for multiple stakeholders in recommender systems has been studied mostly in terms of algorithmic interventions: building new models with better fairness properties, or using reranking to improve outcomes from an…

Online health communities (OHCs) offer the promise of connecting with supportive peers. Forming these connections first requires finding relevant peers - a process that can be time-consuming. Peer recommendation systems are a computational…

The flow of information reaching us via the online media platforms is optimized not by the information content or relevance but by popularity and proximity to the target. This is typically performed in order to maximise platform usage. As a…

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) is integrated into everyday technology, including news, education, and social media. AI has further pervaded private conversations as conversational partners, auto-completion, and response…

Understanding how to engage users is a critical question in many applications. Previous research has shown that unexpected or astonishing events can attract user attention, leading to positive outcomes such as engagement and learning. In…