News recommender systems provide a technological architecture that helps shaping public discourse. Following a normative approach to news recommender system design, we test utility and external ...effects of a diversity-aware news recommender algorithm. In an experimental study using a custom-built news app, we show that diversity-optimized recommendations (1) perform similar to methods optimizing for user preferences regarding user utility, (2) that diverse news recommendations are related to a higher tolerance for opposing views, especially for politically conservative users, and (3) that diverse news recommender systems may nudge users towards preferring news with differing or even opposing views. We conclude that diverse news recommendations can have a depolarizing capacity for democratic societies.
News recommender systems are an increasingly popular field of study that attracts a growing interdisciplinary research community. As these systems play an essential role in our daily lives, the ...mechanisms behind their curation processes are under scrutiny. In the area of personalized news, many platforms make design choices driven by economic incentives. In contrast to such systems that optimize for financial gain, there can be norm-driven diversity systems that prioritize normative and democratic goals. However, their impact on users in terms of inducing behavioral change or influencing knowledge is still understudied. In this paper, we contribute to the field of news recommender system design by conducting a user study that examines the impact of these normative approaches. We a.) operationalize the notion of a deliberative public sphere for news recommendations, show b.) the impact on news usage, and c.) the influence on political knowledge, attitudes and voting behavior. We find that exposure to small parties is associated with an increase in knowledge about their candidates and that intensive news consumption about a party can change the direction of attitudes of readers towards the issues of the party.
Exploring Graph-querying approaches in LifeGraph Rossetto, Luca; Baumgartner, Matthias; Gasser, Ralph ...
Proceedings of the 4th Annual on Lifelog Search Challenge,
08/2021
Conference Proceeding
Odprti dostop
The multi-modal and interrelated nature of lifelog data makes it well suited for graph-based representations. In this paper, we present the second iteration of LifeGraph, a Knowledge Graph for ...Lifelog Data, initially introduced during the 3rd Lifelog Search Challenge in 2020. This second iteration incorporates several lessons learned from the previous version. While the actual graph has undergone only small changes, the mechanisms by which it is traversed during querying as well as the underlying storage system which performs the traversal have been changed. The means for query formulation have also been slightly extended in capability and made more efficient and intuitive. All these changes have the aim of improving result quality and reducing query time.
Diversity in News Recommendations Bernstein, Abraham; Claes de Vreese; Natali Helberger ...
arXiv.org,
05/2021
Paper, Journal Article
Odprti dostop
News diversity in the media has for a long time been a foundational and uncontested basis for ensuring that the communicative needs of individuals and society at large are met. Today, people ...increasingly rely on online content and recommender systems to consume information challenging the traditional concept of news diversity. In addition, the very concept of diversity, which differs between disciplines, will need to be re-evaluated requiring a interdisciplinary investigation, which requires a new level of mutual cooperation between computer scientists, social scientists, and legal scholars. Based on the outcome of a multidisciplinary workshop, we have the following recommendations, directed at researchers, funders, legislators, regulators, and the media industry: 1. Do more research on news recommenders and diversity. 2. Create a safe harbor for academic research with industry data. 3. Optimize the role of public values in news recommenders. 4. Create a meaningful governance framework. 5. Fund a joint lab to spearhead the needed interdisciplinary research, boost practical innovation, develop. reference solutions, and transfer insights into practice.
News diversity in the media has for a long time been a foundational and uncontested basis for ensuring that the communicative needs of individuals and society at large are met. Today, people ...increasingly rely on online content and recommender systems to consume information challenging the traditional concept of news diversity. In addition, the very concept of diversity, which differs between disciplines, will need to be re-evaluated requiring an interdisciplinary investigation, which requires a new level of mutual cooperation between computer scientists, social scientists, and legal scholars. Based on the outcome of a interdisciplinary workshop, we have the following recommendations, directed at researchers, funders, legislators, regulators, and the media industry:
- Conduct interdisciplinary research on news recommenders and diversity.
- Create a safe harbor for academic research with industry data.
- Strengthen the role of public values in news recommenders.
- Create a meaningful governance framework for news recommenders.
- Fund a joint lab to spearhead the needed interdisciplinary research, boost practical innovation, develop reference solutions, and transfer insights into practice.
News diversity in the media has for a long time been a foundational and uncontested basis for ensuring that the communicative needs of individuals and society at large are met. Today, people ...increasingly rely on online content and recommender systems to consume information challenging the traditional concept of news diversity. In addition, the very concept of diversity, which differs between disciplines, will need to be re-evaluated requiring an interdisciplinary investigation, which requires a new level of mutual cooperation between computer scientists, social scientists, and legal scholars. Based on the outcome of a interdisciplinary workshop, we have the following recommendations, directed at researchers, funders, legislators, regulators, and the media industry:
- Conduct interdisciplinary research on news recommenders and diversity.
- Create a safe harbor for academic research with industry data.
- Strengthen the role of public values in news recommenders.
- Create a meaningful governance framework for news recommenders.
- Fund a joint lab to spearhead the needed interdisciplinary research, boost practical innovation, develop reference solutions, and transfer insights into practice.
The automatic analysis of subtle changes between MRI scans is an important tool for assessing disease evolution over time. Manual labeling of evolutions in 3D data sets is tedious and error prone. ...Automatic change detection, however, remains a challenging image processing problem. A variety of MRI artifacts introduce a wide range of unrepresentative changes between images, making standard change detection methods unreliable. In this study we describe an automatic image processing system that addresses these issues. Registration errors and undesired anatomical deformations are compensated using a versatile multiresolution deformable image matching method that preserves significant changes at a given scale. A nonlinear intensity normalization method is associated with statistical hypothesis test methods to provide reliable change detection. Multimodal data is optionally exploited to reduce the false detection rate. The performance of the system was evaluated on a large database of 3D multimodal, MR images of patients suffering from relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis (MS). The method was assessed using receiver operating characteristics (ROC) analysis, and validated in a protocol involving two neurologists. The automatic system outperforms the human expert, detecting many lesion evolutions that are missed by the expert, including small, subtle changes.
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