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May 10, 2019

Fair, Accountable, & Transparent Recommender System – Call for Papers

Research updates
Fair, Accountable, & Transparent Recommender System – Call for Papers

The Journal of Personalization Research (UMUAI) has released a call for papers for a special issue on fair, accountable and transparent recommender systems. Nava Tintarev, member of the management team of the Delft Design for Values Institute, is one of the guest editors for this issue. Its topic aligns well with the core DDfV research themes. Deadline for the submission of an extended abstract is 5 June 2019.

Systems that give you a personalized recommendation are nowadays widespread and exert an influence on people in all domains of their life. According to the Wikipedia page on recommender systems usages include “movies, music, news, books, research articles, search queries, social tags, and products in general. There are also recommender systems for experts, collaborators, jokes, restaurants, garments, financial services, life insurance, romantic partners (online dating), and Twitter pages.”

This special issue addresses research on responsible design, maintenance, evaluation, and study of recommender systems. It is a venue for work that has evolved out of recent workshops and conferences (e.g, FairUMAP, FATRec, FATML, FAT*) on fair, accountable, and transparent (FAT) recommender systems. In particular, it addresses what it means for a recommender system to be responsible, and how to assess the social and human impact of recommender systems. The questions addressed under each criterion are seen as follows:
  • Fairness: what might ‘fairness’ mean in the context of recommendation? How could a recommender be unfair, and how could we measure such unfairness?
  • Accountability: to whom, and under what standard, should a recommender system be accountable? How can or should it and its operators be held accountable? What harms should such accountability be designed to prevent?
  • Transparency: what is the value of transparency in recommendation, and how might it be achieved? How might it trade off with other important concerns?

The topic of the special issue aligns well with three of the four core DDfV research themes, namely how to deal with value operationalization, value assessment and value conflicts in order to realize responsible designs and innovations.

The deadline for extended abstracts for the issue is 5 June 2019.

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