BIRDS 2020

In the emerging technological and social-technical environment, people will be (to some extent, already are) constantly and ubiquitously emerged in a sea of information (or, data). This will be

• Information (data) of a great variety of “kinds”;
• Information (data) from or about increasingly varied and numerous sources;
• Information (data) in increasingly varied and numerous media types;
• Information (data) available in increasingly varied and numerous modalities; and,
• Information (data) available for access and interaction in increasingly varied and numerous contexts.

And, increasingly, “pushed” information will compete with, indeed, replace “pulled” information. All of these conditions have major implications for research and practice in each of the fields of Information Science, Information Retrieval, and Data Science, individually, in their interactions with one another, and, perhaps most importantly, in their integration. These implications present both challenges and opportunities with respect to the goal of supporting people’s interactions with information (data). In this presentation, I propose the concept of “radical personalization” as a means to support effective interaction amongst IS, IR and DS and to address these challenges and to take advantage of these opportunities. I also discuss some ethical issues inherent in supporting people’s interactions with information (data) in the era of information ubiquity in general, and in this specific approach to that goal.

Nicholas Belkin is Distinguished Professor of Information Science Emeritus, at the Department of Library & Information Science, Rutgers University, and Adjunct Professor at the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology. Previous to these appointments, he was Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Information Science, The City University, London. He has held visiting positions at the University of Western Ontario, the Free University, Berlin, and the Institute for Systems Science, National University of Singapore. Professor Belkin was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Tampere in 1996, and a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Croatia in 2003. He received his Ph.D. in Information Studies from the University of London (University College).

Professor Belkin has served as the Chair of the ACM SIGIR, and President of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIST). He is the recipient of the ASIST’s Outstanding Teacher award, its Research Award, and its Award of Merit, for outstanding contributions to Information Science. He is one of the founders of the “cognitive viewpoint” in information science, and is the co-author of one the first books to explicitly investigate and describe the process of interactive information retrieval. He is the author or co-author of over 200 journal articles, conference proceedings and book chapters, and has been identified variously as the first or second most highly cited scholar in Library and Information Science.

Professor Belkin has conducted ethnographic, sociological, behavioral and experimental research, including twelve years in the TREC Interactive Track. His most recent projects have focused on personalization of interaction with information, in particular, personalization of information retrieval based on searchers’ current and past behaviors, and on methods for evaluation of whole-session search. Professor Belkin’s research has been supported by many agencies, including NSF, Institute of Museum and Library Development Department NIST, US Department of Education, the British Library Research and Development Department, and NATO.

Ranking in Information Retrieval (IR) has been traditionally evaluated from the perspective of the relevance of search engine results to people searching for information, i.e., the extent to which the system provides "the right information, to the right people, in the right way, at the right time." However, people in current IR systems are not only the ones issuing search queries, but increasingly they are also the ones being searched. This raises several new problems in IR that have been addressed in recent research, particularly with respect to fairness/non-discrimination, accountability, and transparency.

https://doi.org/10.1145/3308774.3308783

Carlos Castillo is a Distinguished Research Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, where he leads the Web Science and Social Computing research group. 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, highly cited researcher who has co-authored over 80 publications in top-tier international conferences and journals, receiving a test-of-time award, four best paper awards, and two best student paper awards. 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 is General Co-Chair of ACM FAT*2020 and has been PC Co-Chair of ACM Digital Health 2016, 2017, and 2018 and of WSDM 2014; he 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 is accredited at the full professor level in Catalonia.