Why am I seeing This?
In this episode of Data Skeptic, we explore the challenges of studying social media recommender systems when exposure data isn't accessible. Our guests Sabrina Guidotti, Gregor Donabauer, and Dimitri Ognibene introduce their innovative "recommender neutral user model" for inferring the influence of opaque algorithms. https://biconnect.psicologia.unimib.it/index.php/social-media-data-collection/
Guests
Dimitri Ognibene: Since October 2020 I'm Associate Professor at Milano Bicocca University. Before, I had joined University of Essex as Lecturer in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence in October 2017 moving from University Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain) where I was focusing on the development of algorithms for intelligent social agents with bounded sensory and computational resources supported by a Marie Curie Actions COFUND fellowship. Before I have been developing algorithms for active vision in industrial robotic tasks as a Research Associate (RA) at Centre for Robotics Research, Kings College London; devising Bayesian methods and robotic models for attention in social and dynamic environments as a RA at the Personal Robotics Laboratory in Imperial College London; studying interaction between active vision and autonomous learning in neuro-robotic models as a RA at Institute of Cognitive Science and Technologies of the Italian Research Council (ISTC CNR). I also collaborated with Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging (UCL) to study how to model exploration in the active inference modelling paradigm. I have also been Visiting Researcher at Bounded Resource Reasoning Laboratory in UMass and at University of Reykjavik (Iceland) exploring the symmetries between active sensor control and active computation or metareasoning. I obtained my PhD in Robotics in 2009 from University of Genoa with a thesis titled "Ecological Adaptive Perception from a Neuro-Robotic perspective: theory, architecture and experiments " and graduated in Information Engineering at the University of Palermo in 2004.
Sabrina Guidotti: Sabrina Guidotti is a Master’s student in Computer Science at the University of Milano-Bicocca, specializing in AI and recommender systems. She also has experience as a software engineer, working on large-scale systems and user-facing applications.
Gregor Donabauer: Since October 2021, I have been a PhD student and research officer at the Chair of Information Science at the University of Regensburg (Germany). I previously also worked as a research assistant at the University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy) in Prof. Dimitri Ognibene’s BiConnect Lab, collaborating on the VolkswagenStiftung-funded COURAGE research project. I hold both a Bachelor’s degree in Information Science/Business Information Systems and a Master’s degree in Information Science from the University of Regensburg. My research interests focus on Natural Language Processing and Graph Machine Learning, particularly in the areas of Information Retrieval and applications in the medical domain. In addition, I serve as an elected committee member of the British Computer Society’s Information Retrieval specialist Group (BCS IRSG) for the 2023–2025 term.