Carlos Castillo, professor at our Department and coordinator of the Web Science and Social Computing Group, gave a seminar on ethics working with social media, as part of the PhD program. The talk was based on:
Tutorial on Social Data Biases
Alexandra Olteanu, Carlos Castillo, Fernando Diaz, and Emre Kiciman (2016). Social Data: Biases, Methodological Pitfalls, and Ethical Boundaries. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2886526
The full set of slides are available here.
Additional research outputs on the topic by Carlos Castillo can be found in this link.
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Seminar
Ethics working with social media
By Carlos Castillo
Abstract
Online social data such as user-generated content, expressed or implicit relationships between people, and behavioral traces are at the core of many popular web applications and platforms, driving the research agenda of many researcher in both academia and industry. The promises of social data are many, including the understanding of “what the world thinks” about a social issue, brand, product, celebrity, or other entity, as well as enabling be er decision-making in a variety of elds including public policy, healthcare, and economics.
However, many academics and practitioners are increasingly warning against the naive usage of social data. The seminar will mostly focus on the ethical boundaries and unexpected consequences that are overlooked. Such an overlook can lead to wrong or inappropriate results that can be consequential.
Biography
Carlos Castillo is a Distinguished Research Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He is a web miner with a background on information retrieval, and has been influential in the areas of crisis informatics, web content quality and credibility, and adversarial web search. He is a prolific researcher with more than 75 publications in top-tier international conferences and journals, receiving a test-of-time award, two best paper awards, two best student paper awards, 11,000+ citations and having an h-index of 52. His works include a book on Big Crisis Data, as well as monographs on Information and Influence Propagation, and Adversarial Web Search.
Carlos received his Ph.D from the University of Chile (2004), and was a visiting scientist at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (2005) and Sapienza Universitá di Roma (2006) before working as a scientist and senior scientist at Yahoo! Research (2006-2012), as a senior scientist and principal scientist at Qatar Computing Research Institute (2012-2015), and as director of research for data science at Eurecat (2016-2017).
He has served in the Program Committee (PC) or Senior PC (SPC) of all major conferences in his area (WWW, WSDM, SIGIR, KDD, CIKM, etc.), and is part of the editorial committee of ACM Transactions on the Web and ACM Transactions in Social Computing He has been PC Co-Chair of ACM Digital Health 2016, 2017, and 2018 and of WSDM 2014; co-organized the Adversarial Information Retrieval Workshop and Web Spam Challenge in 2007 and 2008, the ECML/PKDD Discovery Challenge in 2010 and 2014, the Web Quality Workshop from 2011 to 2014, and the Social Web for Disaster Management Workshop in 2015, 2016, and 2018. He is an ACM Senior Member, an IEEE Senior Member, and an advanced researcher accredited by AQU in Catalonia.
More information including recent publications: http://chato.cl/research/
