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SUMMARY:IC Colloquium: Detecting and combating polarization in online medi
 a
DTSTART:20191118T141500
DTEND:20191118T153000
DTSTAMP:20260407T193458Z
UID:70482e1e1198eb4696c8ae29bf2848ae15c5cb5e35f863b51fd07eb6
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:By: Aristides Gionis - Aalto University\nVideo of his talk\n\n
 Abstract:\nOnline social media is an important venue of public discourse t
 oday\, hosting the opinions of hundreds of millions of individuals. Social
  media are often credited for providing a technological means to break inf
 ormation barriers and promote diversity and democracy. In practice\, howev
 er\, the opposite effect is often observed: users tend to favor content th
 at agrees with their existing world-view\, get less exposure to conflictin
 g viewpoints\, and eventually create "echo chambers" and increased polariz
 ation. Arguably\, without any kind of moderation\, current social-media pl
 atforms gravitate towards a state in which net-citizens are constantly rei
 nforcing their existing opinions.\n\nIn this talk we present some of our o
 ngoing work on analyzing discussions in online media. We first focus on th
 e problem of detecting polarization in signed networks\, which offer a sim
 ple but powerful abstraction to model user interactions by annotating edge
 s as positive (friendly) or negative (antagonistic). Detecting polarizatio
 n in signed networks is formulated as searching for two subsets of vertice
 s (communities) having mostly positive edges within and mostly negative ed
 ges across. We distinguish different problem variants\, and we develop alg
 orithms with provable guarantees based on spectral analysis. We then addre
 ss the problem of designing algorithms to break filter bubbles\, reduce po
 larization\, and increase diversity. We discuss different strategies based
  on content recommendation\, as well as an approach based on clustering wi
 th non-polarized representatives.\n\nBio:\nAristides Gionis is a professor
  in the department of Computer Science in Aalto University. He is currentl
 y a fellow in the ISI Foundation\, Turin\, and in 2016 he was a visiting p
 rofessor in the University of Rome. His previous appointment was with Yaho
 o! Research\, Barcelona\, where he was a senior research scientist and gro
 up leader. He obtained his PhD in 2003 from Stanford University\, USA. He 
 is currently serving as an action editor in the Data Management and Knowle
 dge Discovery journal (DMKD)\, an associate editor in the ACM Transactions
  on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD)\, and an associate editor in the 
 ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB). He has contributed in different areas 
 of data science\, such as algorithmic data analysis\, web mining\, social-
 media analysis\, data clustering\, and privacy-preserving data mining. His
  current research is funded by the Academy of Finland (projects Nestor\, A
 gra\, AIDA\, and MLDB) and by the European Commission (project SoBigData).
 \n\nMore information
LOCATION:BC 420 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==BC%20420
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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