Michael Ekstrand ▼

Fair Recommender Systems

In this project, we are investigating several questions of fairness and bias in recommender systems:

  • What does it mean for a recommender to be fair, unfair, or biased?
  • What potentially discriminatory biases are present in the recommender’s input data, algorithmic structure, or output?
  • How do these biases change over time through the recommender-user feedback loop?

This is a part of our overall, ongoing goal to help make recommenders (and other AI systems) better for the people they affect.

Blog Posts and Other Coverage

Funding

Workshops and Meetings

I have been involved with several workshops, sessions, etc. related to fair recommendation.

Publications

SIGIR23q
2023

Amifa Raj, Bhaskar Mitra, Michael D. Ekstrand, and Nick Craswell. 2023. Patterns of Gender-Specializing Query Reformulation. To appear as a short paper in ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR ’23). DOI 10.1145/3539618.3592034. arXiv:2304.13129.

CHIIR23
2023

Christine Pinney, Amifa Raj, Alex Hanna, and Michael D. Ekstrand. 2023. Much Ado About Gender: Current Practices and Future Recommendations for Appropriate Gender-Aware Information Access. In ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR ’23). DOI 10.1145/3576840.3578316. arXiv:2301.04780. Acceptance rate: 39.4%. Cited 1 time.

FAccTRec22
2022

Michael D. Ekstrand and Maria Soledad Pera. 2022. Matching Consumer Fairness Objectives & Strategies for RecSys. Presented at the 5th FAccTrec Workshop on Responsible Recommendation (peer-reviewed but not archived). DOI 10.48550/arXiv.2209.02662. arXiv:2209.02662.

SIGIRec22
2022

Amifa Raj and Michael D. Ekstrand. 2022. Fire Dragon and Unicorn Princess: Gender Stereotypes and Children’s Products in Search Engine Responses. In SIGIR eCom ’22. DOI 10.48550/arXiv.2206.13747. arXiv:2206.13747. Cited 2 times.

FnT22
2022

Michael D. Ekstrand, Anubrata Das, Robin Burke, and Fernando Diaz. 2022. Fairness in Information Access Systems. Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval 16(1–2) (July 2022), 1–177. DOI 10.1561/1500000079. arXiv:2105.05779. Impact factor: 8. Cited 28 times. Cited 24 times.

AIMAG22
2022

Nasim Sonboli, Robin Burke, Michael Ekstrand, and Rishabh Mehrotra. 2022. The Multisided Complexity of Fairness in Recommender Systems. AI Magazine 43(2) (June 2022), 164–176. DOI 10.1002/aaai.12054. NSF PAR 10334796. Cited 5 times. Cited 3 times.

RSHB3E
2022

Michael D. Ekstrand, Anubrata Das, Robin Burke, and Fernando Diaz. 2022. Fairness in Recommender Systems. In Recommender Systems Handbook (3rd edition). Francesco Ricci, Lior Roach, and Bracha Shapira, eds. Springer-Verlag. DOI 10.1007/978-1-0716-2197-4_18. ISBN 978-1-0716-2196-7. Cited 4 times. Cited 7 times.

UMUAI21
2021

Michael D. Ekstrand and Daniel Kluver. 2021. Exploring Author Gender in Book Rating and Recommendation. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction 31(3) (February 2021), 377–420. DOI 10.1007/s11257-020-09284-2. NSF PAR 10218853. Impact factor: 4.412. Cited 114* times.

WWW21
2021

Ömer Kırnap, Fernando Diaz, Asia J. Biega, Michael D. Ekstrand, Ben Carterette, and Emine Yılmaz. 2021. Estimation of Fair Ranking Metrics with Incomplete Judgments. In Proceedings of The Web Conference 2021 (TheWebConf 2021). ACM. DOI 10.1145/3442381.3450080. arXiv:2108.05152. NSF PAR 10237411. Acceptance rate: 21%. Cited 22 times. Cited 21 times.

CIKM20-ee
2020

Fernando Diaz, Bhaskar Mitra, Michael D. Ekstrand, Asia J. Biega, and Ben Carterette. 2020. Evaluating Stochastic Rankings with Expected Exposure. In Proceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM ’20). ACM, pp. 275–284. DOI 10.1145/3340531.3411962. arXiv:2004.13157. NSF PAR 10199451. Acceptance rate: 20%. Nominated for Best Long Paper. Cited 93 times. Cited 89 times.

FAccTRec20
2020

Amifa Raj, Connor Wood, Ananda Montoly, and Michael D. Ekstrand. 2020. Comparing Fair Ranking Metrics. Presented at the 3rd FAccTrec Workshop on Responsible Recommendation (peer-reviewed but not archived). DOI 10.48550/arXiv.2009.01311. arXiv:2009.01311. Cited 15 times. Cited 16 times.

⸘2020‽
2020

Asia J. Biega, Fernando Diaz, Michael D. Ekstrand, and Sebastian Kohlmeier. 2020. Overview of the TREC 2019 Fair Ranking Track. In The Twenty-Eighth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2019) Proceedings (TREC 2019). DOI 10.48550/arXiv.2003.11650. arXiv:2003.11650. Cited 23 times. Cited 27 times.

FORUM19
2019

Alexandra Olteanu, Jean Garcia-Gathright, Maarten de Rijke, Michael D. Ekstrand, Adam Roegiest, Aldo Lipani, Alex Beutel, Ana Lucic, Ana-Andreea Stoica, Anubrata Das, Asia Biega, Bart Voorn, Claudia Hauff, Damiano Spina, David Lewis, Douglas W Oard, Emine Yilmaz, Faegheh Hasibi, Gabriella Kazai, Graham McDonald, Hinda Haned, Iadh Ounis, Ilse van der Linden, Joris Baan, Kamuela N Lau, Krisztian Balog, Mahmoud Sayed, Maria Panteli, Mark Sanderson, Matthew Lease, Preethi Lahoti, and Toshihiro Kamishima. 2019. FACTS-IR: Fairness, Accountability, Confidentiality, Transparency, and Safety in Information Retrieval. SIGIR Forum 53(2) (December 2019), 20–43. DOI 10.1145/3458553.3458556. Cited 4 times. Cited 14 times.

RecSys18
2018

Michael D. Ekstrand, Mucun Tian, Mohammed R. Imran Kazi, Hoda Mehrpouyan, and Daniel Kluver. 2018. Exploring Author Gender in Book Rating and Recommendation. In Proceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys ’18). ACM, pp. 242–250. DOI 10.1145/3240323.3240373. arXiv:1808.07586v1. Acceptance rate: 17.5%. Cited 114 times. Citations reported under UMUAI21*.

FAT18-ck
2018

Michael D. Ekstrand, Mucun Tian, Ion Madrazo Azpiazu, Jennifer D. Ekstrand, Oghenemaro Anuyah, David McNeill, and Maria Soledad Pera. 2018. All The Cool Kids, How Do They Fit In?: Popularity and Demographic Biases in Recommender Evaluation and Effectiveness. In Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency (FAT* 2018). PMLR, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 81:172–186. Acceptance rate: 24%. Cited 146 times. Cited 154 times.

RSPosters17
2017

Michael D. Ekstrand and Maria Soledad Pera. 2017. The Demographics of Cool: Popularity and Recommender Performance for Different Groups of Users. In RecSys 2017 Poster Proceedings. CEUR, Workshop Proceedings 1905. Cited 5 times. Cited 14 times.

Workshop Summaries

⸘2020‽
2020

Michael D. Ekstrand, Pierre-Nicolas Schwab, Jean Garcia-Gathright, Toshihiro Kamishima, and Nasim Sonboli. 2020. 3rd FATREC Workshop: Responsible Recommendation. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys ’20). ACM. DOI 10.1145/3383313.3411538. Cited 4 times. Cited 4 times.

⸘2020‽
2020

Bamshad Mobasher, Stylani Kleanthous, Michael D. Ekstrand, Bettina Berendt, Janna Otterbacher, and Avital Schulner Tal. 2020. FairUMAP 2020: The 3rd Workshop on Fairness in User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization. In Proceedings of the 28th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP ’20). ACM. DOI 10.1145/3340631.3398671. Cited 2 times. Cited 2 times.

⸘2019‽
2019

Alexandra Olteanu, Jean Garcia-Gathright, Maarten de Rijke, and Michael D. Ekstrand. 2019. Workshop on Fairness, Accountability, Confidentiality, Transparency, and Safety in Information Retrieval (FACTS-IR). In Proceedings of the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR ’19). ACM. DOI 10.1145/3331184.3331644. Cited 7 times. Cited 24 times.

⸘2019‽
2019

Bettina Berendt, Veronika Bogina, Robin Burke, Michael D. Ekstrand, Alan Hartman, Stylani Kleanthous, Tsvi Kuflik, Bamshad Mobasher, and Janna Otterbacher. 2019. FairUMAP 2019 Chairs’ Welcome Overview. In Adjunct Publication of the 27th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP ’19). ACM. DOI 10.1145/3314183.3323842.

⸘2018‽
2018

Toshihiro Kamishima, Pierre-Nicolas Schwab, and Michael D. Ekstrand. 2018. 2nd FATREC Workshop: Responsible Recommendation. In Proceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys ’18). ACM. DOI 10.1145/3240323.3240335. Cited 8 times. Cited 10 times.

⸘2018‽
2018

Bamshad Mobasher, Robin Burke, Michael D. Ekstrand, and Bettina Berendt. 2018. UMAP 2018 Fairness in User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (FairUMAP 2018) Chairs’ Welcome & Organization. In Adjunct Publication of the 26th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization (UMAP ’18). ACM. DOI 10.1145/3213586.3226200.

⸘2017‽
2017

Michael D. Ekstrand and Amit Sharma. 2017. The FATREC Workshop on Responsible Recommendation. In Proceedings of the 11th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys ’17). ACM. DOI 10.1145/3109859.3109960. Cited 11 times.