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1. FairRankVis: A Visual Analytics Framework for Exploring Algorithmic Fairness in Graph Mining Models

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2021.3114850  

   Xie, Tiankai; Ma, Yuxin; Kang, Jian; Tong, Hanghang; Maciejewski, Ross (October 2021, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics)

   null (Ed.)

   Graph mining is an essential component of recommender systems and search engines. Outputs of graph mining models typically provide a ranked list sorted by each item's relevance or utility. However, recent research has identified issues of algorithmic bias in such models, and new graph mining algorithms have been proposed to correct for bias. As such, algorithm developers need tools that can help them uncover potential biases in their models while also exploring the impacts of correcting for biases when employing fairness-aware algorithms. In this paper, we present FairRankVis, a visual analytics framework designed to enable the exploration of multi-class bias in graph mining algorithms. We support both group and individual fairness levels of comparison. Our framework is designed to enable model developers to compare multi-class fairness between algorithms (for example, comparing PageRank with a debiased PageRank algorithm) to assess the impacts of algorithmic debiasing with respect to group and individual fairness. We demonstrate our framework through two usage scenarios inspecting algorithmic fairness. 

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2. LuckyFind: Leveraging Surprise to Improve User Satisfaction and Inspire Curiosity in a Recommender System

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3406522.3446017  

   Niu, Xi; Al-Doulat, Ahmad (March 2021, CHIIR '21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval)

   null (Ed.)

   The growing amount of online information today has increased opportunity to discover interesting and useful information. Various recommender systems have been designed to help people discover such information. No matter how accurately the recommender algorithms perform, users’ engagement with recommended results has been complained being less than ideal. In this study, we touched on two human-centered objectives for recommender systems: user satisfaction and curiosity, both of which are believed to play roles in maintaining user engagement and sustain such engagement in the long run. Specifically, we leveraged the concept of surprise and used an existing computational model of surprise to identify relevantly surprising health articles aiming at improving user satisfaction and inspiring their curiosity. We designed a user study to first test the validity of the surprise model in a health news recommender system, called LuckyFind. Then user satisfaction and curiosity were evaluated. We find that the computational surprise model helped identify surprising recommendations at little cost of user satisfaction. Users gave higher ratings on interestingness than usefulness for those surprising recommendations. Curiosity was inspired more for those individuals who have a larger capacity to experience curiosity. Over half of the users have changed their preferences after using LuckyFind, either discovering new areas, reinforcing their existing interests, or stopping following those they did not want anymore. The insights of the research will make researchers and practitioners rethink the objectives of today’s recommender systems as being more human-centered beyond algorithmic accuracy. 

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3. The Connection Between Popularity Bias, Calibration, and Fairness in Recommendation

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3383313.3418487  

   Abdollahpouri, Himan; Mansoury, Masoud; Burke, Robin; Mobasher, Bamshad (September 2020, RecSys '20: Fourteenth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems)

   null (Ed.)

   Recently there has been a growing interest in fairness-aware recommender systems including fairness in providing consistent performance across different users or groups of users. A recommender system could be considered unfair if the recommendations do not fairly represent the tastes of a certain group of users while other groups receive recommendations that are consistent with their preferences. In this paper, we use a metric called miscalibration for measuring how a recommendation algorithm is responsive to users’ true preferences and we consider how various algorithms may result in different degrees of miscalibration for different users. In particular, we conjecture that popularity bias which is a well-known phenomenon in recommendation is one important factor leading to miscalibration in recommendation. Our experimental results using two real-world datasets show that there is a connection between how different user groups are affected by algorithmic popularity bias and their level of interest in popular items. Moreover, we show that the more a group is affected by the algorithmic popularity bias, the more their recommendations are miscalibrated. 

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4. User and Recommender Behavior Over Time: Contextualizing Activity Effectiveness Diversity and Fairness in Book Recommendation

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3708319.3733710  

   Vaez_Barenji, Samira; Parajuli, Sushobhan; Ekstrand, Michael D (June 2025, ACM)

   Data is an essential resource for studying recommender systems. While there has been significant work on improving and evaluating state-of-the-art models and measuring various properties of recommender system outputs, less attention has been given to the data itself, particularly how data has changed over time. Such documentation and analysis provide guidance and context for designing and evaluating recommender systems, particularly for evaluation designs making use of time (e.g., temporal splitting). In this paper, we present a temporal explanatory analysis of the UCSD Book Graph dataset scraped from Goodreads, a social reading and recommendation platform active since 2006. We measure the book interaction data using a set of activity, diversity, and fairness metrics; we then train a set of collaborative filtering algorithms on rolling training windows to observe how the same measures evolve over time in the recommendations. Additionally, we explore whether the introduction of algorithmic recommendations in 2011 was followed by observable changes in user or recommender system behavior. 

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5. Toward A Two-Sided Fairness Framework in Search and Recommendation

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3576840.3578332  

   Liu, Jiqun (March 2023, CHIIR '23: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval)

   As artificial intelligence (AI) assisted search and recommender systems have become ubiquitous in workplaces and everyday lives, understanding and accounting for fairness has gained increasing attention in the design and evaluation of such systems. While there is a growing body of computing research on measuring system fairness and biases associated with data and algorithms, the impact of human biases that go beyond traditional machine learning (ML) pipelines still remain understudied. In this Perspective Paper, we seek to develop a two-sided fairness framework that not only characterizes data and algorithmic biases, but also highlights the cognitive and perceptual biases that may exacerbate system biases and lead to unfair decisions. Within the framework, we also analyze the interactions between human and system biases in search and recommendation episodes. Built upon the two-sided framework, our research synthesizes intervention and intelligent nudging strategies applied in cognitive and algorithmic debiasing, and also proposes novel goals and measures for evaluating the performance of systems in addressing and proactively mitigating the risks associated with biases in data, algorithms, and bounded rationality. This paper uniquely integrates the insights regarding human biases and system biases into a cohesive framework and extends the concept of fairness from human-centered perspective. The extended fairness framework better reflects the challenges and opportunities in users’ interactions with search and recommender systems of varying modalities. Adopting the two-sided approach in information system design has the potential to enhancing both the effectiveness in online debiasing and the usefulness to boundedly rational users engaging in information-intensive decision-making. 

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