Join iSchool Professors Dr. Chirag Shah and Dr. Tanu Mitra for the iSchool's Alumni and Community Spring Lecture! Submit your questions here.

Today, online systems have become integral to our daily lives. Yet, these systems and the algorithms driving them surface problematic content, whether they be biased content or harmful misinformation. Left unchecked, these problems can negatively impact our democracy.

In this talk, we will take examples from search and recommender systems to show how and why these biases play out. We will present some of the recent works on Google search rankings to pinpoint the problem and propose a way forward. Going further, we begin to question how do we systematically investigate algorithmic misinformation? How do we govern algorithmic systems to safeguard against problematic content? 

To answer these questions, we will present results of algorithmic audits for misinformation conducted on the search and recommendation algorithms driving two platforms:

1) YouTube, the most popular video search platform

2) Amazon, the world’s leading e-commerce platform 

These problems and solutions are much broader than search and recommendation scenarios, spanning all types of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) systems. To that end, we will introduce ideas for how we could develop effective long-term algorithmic governance and address the problems of bias under the umbrella of Responsible AI.