A one-day online workshop on Fairness and Bias in Information Retrieval will take place on 23 March 2021.The workshop will bring together practitioners from academia and industry to discuss the challenges relating to fairness in information retrieval (IR) that are faced by industry, and the recent advances in fair IR research. The workshop should have taken place in March last year but just failed to beat the lock down. The benefit is that, in my view, the topics have become even more important to discuss.
Many organisations are bound by regulations or laws that require them to ensure fairness in the information that they provide to the public. For example, media companies should be impartial in the on-line content that they produce to comply with editorial guidelines, and governments must be unbiased when releasing or retaining information through FOI and GDPR. IR systems are playing an increasingly important role in selecting the information to be made available to the public in contexts such as these, e.g. search and recommendation systems for finding on-line content or technology-assisted review for identifying sensitive government information.
If you want to read an introduction to the topic Chirag Shah and Rouyoan Gao have written How Fair Can We Go: Detecting the Boundaries of Fairness Optimization in Information Retrieval (download)
The objective of the workshop is to raise awareness of fair IR challenges, to foster knowledge transfer and encourage discussion with a view to identifying new research directions in fair IR systems.
Confirmed speakers include:
Maarten De Rijke, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Jean-Michel Renders, Naver Labs Europe, France.
Rishabh Mehrotra, Spotify, London, UK.
Claudia Hauff, Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), The Netherlands.
Carlos Castillo, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Amifa Raj, Boise State University, USA.
Pablo Castells, Universidad Autónonoma de Madrid, Spain.
Leif Azzopardi, University of Strathclyde, UK.
Frank Hopfgartner, University of Sheffield, UK.
Tim Gollins, National Records of Scotland, UK.
The event is organized by Graham McDonald and Iadh Ounis, University of Glasgow, UK.
Tickets can be booked at Fairness and Bias in Information Retrieval Tickets | Eventbrite