Guest Lectures
Other than our main lecture series, the Interdisciplinary Institute for Societal Computing also organizes one-off lectures, inviting academics and researchers to present their work.
Guest Lectures
March 24, 2025
Room 3.23, E1 7, Saarland University from 15h-16h.
Measuring and mitigating risks with online platforms
In this talk, I will discuss risks associated with online advertising and micro-targeting and present methodological approaches for measuring and mitigating these risks. I will provide insights from some of our latest results on political ad micro-targeting, marketing to children, and tracking. I will discuss how our measurement studies informed European lawmaking, how citizens can help, and how researchers interested in assessing risks with online platforms can take advantage of the latest EU laws.
September 4, 2024
Room 3.23, E1 7, Saarland University from 13h-14h.
Measuring Bias in Human Interactions with Automated Decision-Making Systems and Designing Bias Mitigation Strategies
In this work, Danula will provide an overview of how his research examines user interactions with automated decision-making systems and explores how biases manifest, which influences future system decisions and user perceptions. He will focus on three research streams that he and his team work on.
how they use various survey instruments and sensing methods to better understand the user and characterize the interactions, which is instrumental to designing effective interventions.
how they design to help users focus on their work on multiparty fair recommendations, which addresses the lack of understanding regarding user perceptions of fair recommendations, particularly in contexts where two parties are involved, such as customers and producers in online marketplaces.
other exciting work around how they go beyond users and consider the involuntary stakeholders of systems.
July 2, 2024
Room 3.23, E1 7, Saarland University from 13h-14h.
Digital Polarization and the Future of Journalism in India
The work of journalism has been mediated by online spaces, especially Twitter/X for much of the last decade. In India, the incorporation and monetization of Twitter and YouTube for journalists to output their work and articulate their worldviews have enabled their arrangement along the lines of political positions they perform online. In this talk, I show that the framing of journalists through the lens of their politics undermines the work and credibility of professional journalism, and creates a space for digital influencers to muscle into being mediators of public opinion, especially as it relates to the outreach strategies of political parties. I argue that these trends are amplified by both the technological affordances of social media platforms and the network structures of communities that have succeeded in gaming these. This presents challenges to political accountability and democratic engagement in India and allows for new forms of institutional and discursive capture by redefining the contours of trustworthy information.