Lunch Seminar Series | Societal Concerns in Targeted Advertising
Tuesday, March 3, 20201:00 PM - 2:15 PM (Pacific)
Encina Hall, Second Floor, East Wing, E207
616 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305
Abstract: The enormous financial success of online advertising platforms is in large part due to the advanced targeting features they offer. WiSE Gabilan Assistant Professor of Computer Science at USC, Aleksandra Korolova will discuss recent findings showing how implementations of targeted advertising create new societal concerns related to privacy, manipulation of the vulnerable, and discrimination. Furthermore, Korolova will demonstrate that the ad delivery optimization algorithms run by the platforms can lead to skew in delivery along gender and racial lines, even when such skew was not intended by the advertiser. Korolova will conclude by introducing a new fairness notion, preference-informed fairness, that could serve as a novel step towards formally studying fairness in scenarios such as targeted advertising, where individuals have complex and diverse preferences over possible outcomes.
Based on joint work with I. Faizullabhoy (ConPro 2018), M. Ali, P. Sapiezynski, M. Bogen, A. Mislove, A. Rieke (CSCW 2019), and M. P. Kim, G. Rothblum, G. Yona (ITCS 2020, FAT* 2020).