Nasim Sonboli

University of Colorado Boulder | CUB · Information Science

Recommender systems utilize users' historical data to learn and predict their future interests, providing them with suggestions tailored to their tastes. Calibration ensures that the distribution of recommended item categories is consistent with the user's historical data. Mitigating miscalibration brings various benefits to a recommender system. F...

Recommender systems utilize users' historical data to learn and predict their future interests, providing them with suggestions tailored to their tastes. Calibration ensures that the distribution of recommended item categories is consistent with the user's historical data. Mitigating miscalibration brings various benefits to a recommender system. F...

Recommender systems are poised at the interface between stakeholders: for example, job applicants and employers in the case of recommendations of employment listings, or artists and listeners in the case of music recommendation. In such multisided platforms, recommender systems play a key role in enabling discovery of products and information at la...

Though recommender systems are defined by personalization, recent work has shown the importance of additional, beyond-accuracy objectives, such as fairness. Because users often expect their recommendations to be purely personalized, these new algorithmic objectives must be communicated transparently in a fairness-aware recommender system. While exp...

2020 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT'20), 14-17 December 2020, Melbourne, Australia.

Nowadays, the use of social information is extending to more and more application domains. In the field of recommender systems, this information has been exploited in different ways to address some problems, especially associated with collabora-tive filtering methods, and thus achieve more reliable recom-mendations. Specifically, social tagging is...

As recommender systems are being designed and deployed for an increasing number of socially-consequential applications, it has become important to consider what properties of fairness these systems exhibit. There has been considerable research on recommendation fairness. However, we argue that the previous literature has been based on simple, unifo...

As recommender systems have become more widespread and moved into areas with greater social impact, such as employment and housing, researchers have begun to seek ways to ensure fairness in the results that such systems produce. This work has primarily focused on developing recommendation approaches in which fairness metrics are jointly optimized a...

As recommender systems have become more widespread and moved into areas with greater social impact, such as employment and housing , researchers have begun to seek ways to ensure fairness in the results that such systems produce. This work has primarily focused on developing recommendation approaches in which fairness metrics are jointly optimized...

Algorithmic fairness for artificial intelligence has become increasingly relevant as these systems become more pervasive in society. One realm of AI, recommender systems, presents unique challenges for fairness due to trade offs between optimizing accuracy for users and fairness to providers. But what is fair in the context of recommendation--parti...

Recommender systems are personalized: we expect the results given to a particular user to reflect that user's preferences. Some researchers have studied the notion of calibration, how well recommendations match users' stated preferences, and bias disparity the extent to which mis-calibration affects different user groups. In this paper, we examine...

Microlending can lead to improved access to capital in impoverished countries. Recommender systems could be used in microlending to provide efficient and personalized service to lenders. However, increasing concerns about discrimination in machine learning hinder the application of recommender systems to the microfinance industry. Most previous rec...

Recent research in fairness in machine learning has identified situations in which biases in input data can cause harmful or unwanted effects. Researchers in the areas of personalization and recommendation have begun to study similar types of bias. What these lines of research share is a fixed representation of the protected groups relative to whic...

Like other social systems, in collaborative filtering a small number of "influential" users may have a large impact on the recommendations of other users, thus affecting the overall behavior of the system. Identifying influential users and studying their impact on other users is an important problem because it provides insight into how small groups...

In this article, we describe DePaul University's summer data science academy for Chicago Public School students which was, in part, funded through the SIGKDD Impact Award program in 2018. The goal of the academy was to increase awareness about data science among high school students. The program specifically aimed to broaden participation of underr...

When evaluating recommender systems for their fairness, it may be necessary to make use of demographic attributes, which are personally sensitive and usually excluded from publicly-available data sets. In addition, these attributes are fixed and therefore it is not possible to experiment with different distributions using the same data. In this pap...

Suppliers of music streaming services are showing an increasing interest for providing users with reliable personalized recommendations since their practically unlimited offerings make it difficult for users to find the music they like. In this work, we take advantage of social tags that users give to music through streaming platforms for improving...