THE WEB CONFERENCE KEYNOTE SPEECH: Fausto Giunchiglia - Diversity, Bias, online social relations and
Channel: VideoLecturesChannel
Date: 20/04/2021

The Web has transformed our lives by allowing us to transcend temporal, geographical and cultural borders. It is a fact that we get exposed daily to a seemingly unbound amount of diversity and, therefore, of opportunities; think for instance of the emergence of global digital platforms. At the same time, the Web often does not allow for prolonged interactions, thus amplifying the negative effects of diversity, in particular when it is unknown and unexpected; think for instance of the emergence of online fake news, bias and unethical behavior. In this talk we distinguish between two types of diversity, that we call inessential and essential diversity. We start from an analysis of inessential diversity, by far the one mostly studied so far, trying to put the current work on various related issues e.g., bias, transparency, fairness, under a new perspective. The second part of the talk will concentrate on essential diversity describing the first results of a large project whose main goal is to exploit diversity towards the empowerment of new types of online social relations.

Bio:
Fausto Giunchiglia: Professor of Computer Science, University of Trento, EURAI fellow, member of the Academia Europaea. Previously studied or had positions at the Universities of Genoa, Stanford, Edinburgh, and at the research center IRST (now FBK, Trento). Current research interest: Computational models of the mind and implications on how the known is grounded in the unknown. Around 10 Best Paper Awards; 50+ invited talks in International events; chair of 10+ international events, among them: ICDCS, KSEM, ODBASE, IJCAI, KRR; editor or editorial board member of around 10 journals, among them: Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems, Journal of applied non Classical Logics, Journal of Software Tools for Technology Transfer, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. He was member of the IJCAI Board of Trustees, President of IJCAI, President of KR, Inc., Advisory Board member of  KR, Inc., Steering Committee of the  CONTEXT conference. Fausto has covered all the spectrum from theory to technology transfer and innovation. He was involved in more than 20 international R&D projects, including several EC projects. Relevant to the topic of this talk, Fausto is currently involved in the following projects: WeNet – The Internet of Us. https://www.internetofus.eu/ CYCAT – Center for Algorithmic Transparency. http://www.cycat.io/ More details can be found at: http://knowdive.disi.unitn.it/