MediaFutures

MediaFutures Seminar: Digital backbones: Data streams in the digital infrastructure and consequences for the media industries with Helle Sjøvaag and Raul Ferrer Conill from the University of Stavanger
2023-02-14 12:00 - 13:00 (Europe/Oslo)
Helle Sjøvaag and Raul Ferrer Conill from the University of Stavanger will give a seminar on February 14th.
TITLE: Digital backbones: Data streams in the digital infrastructure and consequences for the media industries
WHEN: 14 February, 12:00 – 13:00
WHERE: MediaFutures & ZOOM:
https://uib.zoom.us/j/63852177471?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 638 5217 7471
Password: [REDACTED]

ABSTRACT:

Digital infrastructures consist of backbone structures comprising Internet Exchange Points, Content Delivery Networks, Data Centers, and subsea fiber cables. Contrary to access structures (typically broadband), these structures are not regulated beyond competition law. As the media industries grow more and more reliant on these structures, particularly for content streaming, the ownership, regulation, and data streams of the internet’s backbone remain serious blind spots in media infrastructure research. Helle Sjøvaag has spent the last year mapping these infrastructures for Norway. In this presentation, Sjøvaag will present her insights into these backbone structures, including their ownership and regulation, and discuss what the shifting ecology of the internet backbones means for media industries in Norway.In this talk, Helle Sjøvaag together with Raul Ferrer Conill, will present ongoing work from the project The datafication of communicative power: Towards an independent media policy for Norway’s digital infrastructures, funded by the Research Council of Norway.
Link to the project: https://www.uis.no/en/research/norways-digital-infrastructures
BIO:
Helle Sjøvaag is Professor of Journalism at the Department of Media and Social Sciences at the University of Stavanger.
Raul Ferrer Conill is Associate Professor at the Department of Media and Social Sciences at the University of Stavanger.

Innovation workshop with Vestlandets Innovasjonsselskap (VIS)
2023-02-07 09:00 - 13:00
MediaFutures and VIS would like to invite you to an innovation workshop taking place at MediaFutures on February the 7th.
Vestlandets Innovasjonsselskap (VIS) is a Technology Transfer Office (TTO) established in 2004 and owned by the University of Bergen, Haukeland University Hospital, the Institute of Marine Research, Siva, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, and NHH Norwegian Business School.
The goal of the workshop is to raise awareness of the value of intellectual property (IP) which is created through research, as well as management of rights in collaboration with industry partners.
The workshop is targeted at PhDs, PostDocs, researchers, Professors and industry partners who are curious about the process of bringing an idea/ a prototype to market, and who want to learn more about IP-rights.
Themes and topics for the workshop:

1. The commercialization process

Research-driven innovation (TTO)
Industry-driven innovation
Ability and reputation
Research collaboration with industrial partner

2. IP rights

IP and research at UiB
Strategies and management of IP

3. Software and IPR

Patenting – requirements and prerequisites
Other protection strategies

4. Case discussions / group work
Please see the attached preliminary program for more details.
The workshop will be held at MediaFutures 7th February from 09:15-12:00, followed by a lunch for all participants.
If you would like to participate, please sign up by sending an e-mail to Ola Roth Johnsen, ola.johnsen@uib.no, or Knut Risnes, knut.risnes@uib.no.

Seminar UiB AI: ChatGPT – trussel eller mulighet i forskning og utdanning?
2023-02-03 10:00 - 12:00
Chatboten ChatGPT har vært mye omtalt i media den siste tiden og skapt debatt blant forskere og undervisere. Hvilke potensiale har avanserte chatboter som ChatGPT, og hvilke implikasjoner kan det ha for vår måte å forske, undervise og lære på?
I årets første UiB AI seminar setter vi søkelyset på et aktuelt tema der verktøy basert på kunstig intelligens kan ha betydning for forskning og utdanning. Kunstig intelligens og maskinlæring har bragt store fremskritt innenfor vitenskapelige metoder og resultater, og noe av dette har vært tema under seminarene til UiB AI i 2022. Det nye med ChatGPT og lignende verktøy er at de har blitt veldig gode til å kommunisere på menneskelige språk og at de er gratis tilgjengelig for alle.
Deltakelse i seminaret er gratis og det blir servert lunsj. Påmelding innen 31. januar.
Program:
Velkommen
Pinar Heggernes, professor, prorektor og leder for UiB AI
Hva er ChatGPT og hvordan fungerer det og lignende verktøy?
Samia Touileb, forsker ved MediaFutures: Research Centre for Responsible Media Technology & Innovation, UiB
ChatGPT kan mange språk men kjenner ikke mange kulturer
Jill Rettberg, professor I digital kultur og leder av ERC-prosjektet Machine Vision in Everyday Life, UiB
Hva kan slike AI-verkyøy bety for læring, tilbakemelding og vurdering?
Arild Raaheim, professor i pedagogikk, UiB
Hvilke implikasjoner kan AI-verktøy som ChatGPT og Elicit.org ha for forskning?
Barbara Wasson, professor og leder for Centre for the Science of Learning & Technology (SLATE), UiB
Panelsamtale: ChatGPT – trussel eller mulighet i forskning og utdanning?
Eirik Vassenden, professor i nordisk litteratur, UiBDavid Grellscheid, førsteamanuensis i informatikk, UiBSamia TouilebJill RettbergArild RaaheimBarbara Wasson
Moderator: Pinar Heggernes

MediaFutures Seminar: Public expectations of transparency and accountability in citizens’ councils on data-driven media personalisation: Findings and methodological reflections with Ranjana Das, Professor at the University of Surrey
2023-01-26 12:00 - 13:00
Ranjana Das, Professor at the University of Surrey and currently visiting Erasmus fellow at the University of Bergen, will give a seminar on January 26th.
TITLE: Public expectations of transparency and accountability in citizens’ councils on data-driven media personalisation: Findings and methodological reflections
WHEN: 26 Januar, 12:00 – 13:00
WHERE: MediaFutures
ABSTRACT:

This talk presents findings and reflections across a set of three journal papers which emerged from a rigorous, three-wave series of qualitative research into public expectations of data-driven media technologies, conducted across locations in England, by a team bringing together sociology, engineering and media practice. Located within the contexts of the AI4ME project, through a range of carefully chosen scenarios and deliberations around the risks and benefits afforded by data-driven media personalisation technologies, we paid close attention to citizens’ voices, as our multi-disciplinary team sought to engage the public on what ‘good’ might look like in the context of media personalisation. We paid particular attention to risks and opportunities, examining practical use-cases and scenarios, and our three-wave councils culminated in citizens producing recommendations for practice and policy. In this talk, I will focus on citizens’ ethical assessment, critique and improvements proposed on media personalisation methods in relation to benefits, fairness, safety, transparency and accountability, particularly within the broader contexts of their expectations around algorithms and algorithmic systems. I will conclude with some reflections on our citizens council methodology, particularly the use of “vignettes” as scenarios as a method of data collection in user-centric algorithm studies, in terms of their potential in inviting users’ contextual experiences of algorithms but also enabling more normative reflections on what “good” looks like in contemporary datafied societies.
Note: The talk draws upon three journal papers from the team under review currently, and results presented should not be circulated further.
BIO:
Ranjana Das is Professor in Media and Communication, in the Department of Sociology, at the University of Surrey. Her research interests span families, parenting and parenthood, mental health, digital technologies and media audiences and users. Her upcoming book Anticipating algorithms: Algorithmic literacies of datafied parenthood will be published by Rowman & Littlefield. Link to project website: https://ai4me.surrey.ac.uk/
More information on the speaker: https://www.surrey.ac.uk/people/ranjana-das

The seminar is arranged by WP1 Understanding media experiences in SFI MediaFutures. At the seminar we will serve a light lunch on a first come first served-basis.

MediaFutures Seminar: Designing for Collaborative Video Editing with Pavel Okopnyi, PhD Candidate at the University of Bergen
2023-01-18 14:15 - 15:15
Pavel Okopnyi, a PhD Candidate at the University of Bergen, will give a seminar on January 18th.
TITLE: Designing for Collaborative Video Editing
WHEN: 18 Januar, 14:15 – 15:15
WHERE: MediaFutures & Zoom:
https://uib.zoom.us/j/69273144707?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 692 7314 4707
Password: [REDACTED]

ABSTRACT:

The seminar will explore the design space of collaborative video editing through a series of design workshops with video editors. Collaborative video editing can be supported by adding awareness features or other well-known collaborative features found in existing software and introducing new features designed specifically for video editing software. We identify different design concepts that illustrate how such collaborative features can be included in non-linear video editing software and discusses the challenges of introducing such features. Some design concepts are explicitly inspired by existing collaborative tools. However, we suggest that introducing such features might not be straightforward. In other cases, alternative abstract representations of time-based media might be necessary to support collaborative video editing.
BIO:
Pavel Okopnyi is a PhD Candidate at the University of Bergen. His PhD thesis is focused on collaborative aspects of video production workflows. He has master’s degrees in Sociology and Human-Computer Interaction. Pavel’s interests include media production tools, education, software engineering, and video games.

MediaFutures Seminar: Information Seeking Is Much More Than Searching with Alan Smeaton, Professor of Computing at the Dublin City University
2023-01-10 15:15 - 16:15
Alan Smeaton, a Professor of Computing at the Dublin City University, will give a seminar on January 10th.
TITLE: Information seeking is much more than searching
WHEN: 10 Januar, 15:15-16:15
WHERE: MediaFutures & Zoom:
Link: https://uib.zoom.us/j/69616776839?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 696 1677 6839
Password: [REDACTED]
ABSTRACT:

Information seeking is an essential, daily activity that billions of us pursue as part of our work and leisure activities. Information seeking is a journey, a conversation between a searcher and an information repository which can have many final destinations, or none. Searching is one component of information seeking and search or more broadly information retrieval, in its early years has had a focus on known item search or searching around a broad topic. This has been supported and nurtured by our benchmarking activities like TREC, TRECVid, CLEF, FIRE and others and the systems we have developed and that we use in our essential daily information seeking activities reflect this. In this presentation I reflect on the broader information seeing landscape and on how a twist of good (or bad) timing, has left us with the search tools we use but which do not necessarily deliver the best support for our information seeking. This broader perspective will then allow us to contextualise the roles that various forms of media search can play in our information seeking journeys. Towards the end of the talk I will cover generative media where instead of searching for media, we create it.
BIO:
Alan Smeaton is Professor of Computing at Dublin City University where he has previously been Head of School and Dean of Faculty. He is an IEEE Fellow, Principal Fellow of Advance HE and an elected member of the Royal Irish Academy. He is the 2022 winner of the ACM SIGMM Technical Achievement Award for contributions to multimedia computing. Alan’s interests are in human memory and how we forget and remember some things and not others and this involves the use of machine learning and data analytics, and the applications of text, image, and video analysis in areas like learning analytics, personal sensing, and lifelogging.

29th International Conference on Multimedia Modeling
2023-01-09 - 2023-01-12
When:
9. – 12. January 2023
Time: to be announced
What:
The International Conference on Mulitmedia Modeling (MMM) is a leading international conference for researchers and industry practitioners for sharing new ideas, original research results and practical development experiences from all MMM related areas. MediaFutures Research Centre is the co-organizer and co-sponsor of the conference in 2023.
The organizers now call for research papers reporting original investigation results and demonstrations reporting novel and compelling applications. Special sessions, keynote lectures and the Video Browser Showdown will also contribute to a high-quality program.
Read more at: https://www.mmm2023.no/home

MediaFutures Seminar: Maleficent Neural Networks with Michael Riegler, Chief Research Scientist at SimulaMet
2022-12-12 13:15 - 14:15
Michael Riegler, a Chief Research Scientist at SimulaMet and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway, will give a seminar on 12 December.
TITLE: Maleficent Neural Networks
WHEN: 12 December, 13:15-14:15
WHERE: MediaFutures and Zoom:

https://uib.zoom.us/j/69019718716?pwd=[REDACTED]

Meeting ID: 690 1971 8716
Password: [REDACTED]
ABSTRACT:

Neural networks nowadays are used almost everywhere. From our phones to even smart devices such as fridges, etc. Due to their complexity neural networks cannot just solve the task at hand but can also be manipulated to perform other tasks. In this talk I will talk about a new method that allows hiding malicious code in neural networks and running this code on target systems. I will focus on the basic ideas and methods and provide an overview of methods that can help to counter these types of attacks.
BIO:
Michael Alexander Riegler received the Ph.D. degree from the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway. He is currently working as a Chief Research Scientist at SimulaMet, Oslo and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway. His research interests are machine learning in combination with biomedical and social sciences. He is also a member of the Young Academy of Norway.

MediaFutures Seminar: Heads-up Computing: Towards the next interaction paradigm with Shengdong Zhao, an Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore
2022-12-08 11:00 - 12:00
Shengdong Zhao, Associate Professor at the National University of Signapore, will give a seminar on 8 December.
TITLE: Heads-up Computing: Towards the next interaction paradigm
WHEN: 8 December, 11:00-12:00
WHERE: MediaFutures & Zoom:
https://uib.zoom.us/j/66175341824?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 661 7534 1824Password: [REDACTED]

ABSTRACT:
Interaction paradigms (the style of interaction between humans and computers) can significantly change the way we work and live. However, as much as we are empowered by interaction paradigms, we are also significantly constrained by them. Existing interaction paradigms limits our movements and activities, which can negatively affect our overall well-being. Desktop computing, described as “sitting at a desk, interpreting and manipulating symbols”, isolates human beings from interacting with other human beings and nature. Mobile computing, although free us from the office environment, demands constant eye-and-hand engagement, leading to the notorious phenomenon called “smartphone zombies”. We need a new style of interaction that can better support human activities in nature and with other people as well as reducing cognitive load by blending reactive operations with appropriately designed proactive initiatives that can offer just-in-time assistance. By carefully redesigning and integrating some of the latest technologies, including wearable computing, sensors, voice-based multimodal I/O, data analysis and prediction, and distributed networking, etc, the new Heads-up Computing interaction paradigm can be designed to work seamlessly with our everyday movements and activities. It allows humans to interact with information while engaging in a variety of activities; therefore, facilitates a holistic lifestyle where essential human needs in work and life can be more seamlessly blended and fulfilled.

BIO:
Shengdong Zhao is an associate professor of the Computer Science Department at the National University of Singapore (NUS). I am also a member of the NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences & Engineering. My PhD degree is in computer science from the University of Toronto. My master degree is from School of Information Management & Systems, University of California, Berkeley. I also had a dual major in computer science and biology from the Linfield College, Oregon, USA. I founded the NUS-HCI Lab at the National University of Singapore in January 2009. I am passionate about developing new interface tools and applications that can simplify and enrich people’s lives (i.e., Draco, won best iPad App of the year in 2016). I publish regularly in top HCI conferences and journals (ToCHI, CHI, UbiComp, CSCW, UIST, IUI, etc.). I am interested in connecting academy results with the industry, and have served as a senior consultant with the Huawei Consumer Business Group. I frequently participate in program committees of top HCI conferences, and have worked as the paper co-chair for the ACM SIGCHI 2019 and 2020 conferences. In my leisure time, I love to read, run, and explore the beautiful nature.

MediaFutures Annual Meeting
2022-11-15 13:00 - 2022-11-16 16:00
MediaFutures is a centre for research-based innovation at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen. The centre operates under the Norwegian Research Council’s Research-based Innovation (SFI) scheme, and its main goal is to generate innovation and value creation for the Norwegian news media and media technology industry through long-term research on responsible media technologies.
Held on November 15-16 at Media City Bergen, Norway, the 2022 Annual Meeting constitutes a forum for the exchange of scientific results and industry insights within the field of responsible media technology.
Following last year’s success, the 2022 Annual Meeting is expected once again to attract, and bring together Norwegian and international researchers, and industry practitioners with the intent of engaging in discussions on topics related to:

Media experiences
Recommender technology
Content production and analysis
Content interaction and availability
Norwegian language technology

Join us for inspirational keynote talks, prototype demonstrations, presentations held by our researchers, and industry partners, and poster session.
We are pleased to announce our keynote speakers – Birgit Gray, Christian Sandor and Siv Juvik Tveitnes.

REGISTRATION

PROGRAM

Day 1 – Tuesday Nov. 15

12.00 – Registration
13.00 – Welcome address by Centre Director Christoph Trattner
13.10 – Greetings from Gottfried Greve, Vice-Rector for Innovation, Projects and Knowledge Clusters UiB
13.15 – Towards Trustworthy AI in Media ToolsBirgit Gray, Innovation Manager at Deutsche Welle
13.50 – Break
14.05 – Responsible Personalization and Recommendation: an OverviewMehdi Elahi, Associate Professor, UiBResponsible Personalisation and Recommendation: an Industry PerspectiveLars Skjærven, TV2 and Thomas Husken, BT Popularity Bias in RecommendationAnastasiia Klimashevskaia, PhD candidate, MediaFutures

14.45 – Break and snacks
15.00 – Visual Content VerificationDuc Tien Dang Nguyen, Associate Professor, UiB

15.15 – Fake News DetectionGhazaal Sheikhi, Postdoctor, MediaFutures

15.30 – Break
15.45 – Measuring Harmful Representations in Scandinavian Language ModelsSamia Touileb, Researcher, MediaFutures
Why is SFI Innovation So Hard?Eivind Throndsen, Academic Liaison, Schibsted

16.15 – Poster and demo sessions
19.00 – Dinner at Kulturhuset

Day 2 – Wednesday Nov. 16

9.30 – Six Battles to Win for Future Growth in News MediaSiv Juvik Tveitnes, EVP Schibsted News Media
10.05 – Break
10.20 – Understanding news experiences with innovative methodsHallvard Moe, Professor, UiBErik Knudsen, Researcher, MediaFuturesMarianne Borchgrevink-Brækhus, PhD candidate, MediaFutures

11.00 – Break
11.15 – Past and Upcoming 22 Years with Augmented RealityChristian Sandor, Professor Université Paris-Saclay
11.50 – Break
12.00 – Media Content Interaction & AccessibilityNjål Borch, Researcher, NORCEMorten Fjeld, Professor, UiB
12.30 – Lunch
13.30 – Workshop. Thinking beyond media use. How can we make sense of future media experiences?Irene Costera Meijer, Professor, Vrije Universiteit AmsterdamJohn Magnus R. Dahl, Postdoc, MediaFutures
15.00 – Workshop. Synthetic Media for the NewsroomNicholas Diakopoulos, Associate Professor, Northwestern University

KEYNOTES

Birgit Gray, Innovation Manager at Deutsche Welle
Birgit Gray specialises in future media and resulting changes for broadcasters, content providers, creators, and business processes. In her role as Innovation Manager, she explores the use and impact of emerging media technologies and tools, innovation in news services, future facing market developments and innovation/transformation approaches. In recent projects, she covered topics such as Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, AI-Powered Tools, Digital Audio and Responsible AI. As a Strategic Media Consultant, Birgit worked with European media companies and has more than a decade of work experience in London. She has an industry background in broadcasting and holds a Master’s in communication and business studies.
At the MediaFutures 2022 Annual Meeting, Birgit will talk about the road Towards Trustworthy AI in Media Tools.

Birgit Gray

Learn more
Media companies increasingly use AI-powered technologies in content production and analysis workflows – also as integrated components in media tools that support the work of journalists and content experts.
In her keynote, Birgit first introduces the concept of Trustworthy AI and describes associated needs of media companies regarding AI services from external technology providers. Using a concrete example developed in the AI4Media project, she shows how an AI component for DW’s Truly Media verification tool was enhanced with trustworthy AI elements related to transparency and robustness. Birgit then highlights key learnings and challenges in this process, including the need for tailored transparency information and integration into user experiences.
Birgit’s talk aims to raise awareness for Trustworthy AI in media processes and practical approaches that can help to realise AI guidelines and principles.

Christian Sandor, Professor at the Universite Paris-Saclay
Christian Sandor is a professor at the Université Paris-Saclay and the leader of the VENISE team at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique). Since the year 2000, his foremost research interest is Augmented Reality – a technology he believes will have a profound impact on the future of mankind.
In 2005, he obtained a doctorate in Computer Science from the Technische Universität München, and have been working with leading research groups, and institutions around the world. In 2012, he was awarded in Samsung’s Global Research Outreach Program. In 2014, he received a Google Faculty Award for creating an Augmented Reality X-Ray system for Google Glass. In October 2020, he was appointed Augmented Reality Evangelist at the Guangzhou Greater Bay Area Virtual Reality Research Institute. In 2021, Dr. Sandor was named “Associate Editor of the Year” by IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. Read more about Christian here.
During MediaFutures 2022 Annual Meeting, Christian will talk about Past and Upcoming 22 years with Augmented Reality.

Christian Sandor

Learn more
Augmented Reality (AR) embeds spatially-registered computer graphics into a user’s view of the real world. During the last 22 years, AR has progressed enormously from a niche technology to a widely investigated one.
This keynote consists of two parts. First, I speak about how major challenges for AR have been solved over the last 22 years. Second, I speculate about what the next 22 years are going to bring.
The goal of this keynote is to present a Birdseye view of the AR domain, including the balance of power between the major AR forces US and China. In my view, Europe has a very big, possibly almost impossible, challenge ahead to catch up. I hope that my talk will contribute to laying the seeds of a major European AR initiative.

Siv Juvik Tveitnes, EVP Schibsted News Media
Siv Juvik Tveitnes is the Executive Vice President for Schibsted News Media, the leading digital media division in Scandinavia and a part of the Nordic family of digital brands, Schibsted. News Media consists of a broad portfolio of brands such as Bergens Tidende, Stavanger Aftenblad, Aftonbladet, Svenska Dagbladet, Omni, VG and Aftenposten. In addition, Schibsted’s news division has several digital niche products, with the podcast platform Podme among them. In total, News Media’s brands have over 600 million monthly visits. In 2021, News Media had a revenue of 790 M EUR and 2,400 employees.
Previous positions for Siv Juvik Tveitnes include COO for Schibsted Media, CEO in the regional Norwegian Schibsted-owned newspapers Bergens Tidende and Stavanger Aftenblad, and Managing Consultant at Accenture and Bekk Consulting AS. Tveitnes holds a Master of Science, Business Administration and Management from the University of Bath and a Bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences from the University of Bergen.
The title of Siv’s keynote speech: Six battles to win for future growth in news media.

Siv Juvik Tveitnes

Learn more
For the last few decades, the media industry has faced enormous challenges. We have experienced – and are continuing to undergo – a digital transformation. The way in which people consume news and content has radically changed. Information flows are increasing exponentially, and our business models and ways of working have changed in step with new trends.
Through the transformation we have seen declining revenues, cost cutting, reorganisations, and concerns about the future. But two years ago, boosted by the pandemic, the picture turned when we achieved revenue growth for the first time in many years. And in 2021 we reached our goal of News Media as a whole becoming digitally sustainable. The same year we passed one million digital subscribers in total.
The time had come to shift focus from survival to growth. And to operationalise that ambition, we defined six must-win battles for the years to come. My keynote aims to give an insight into these battles and the challenges we face going forward.

WORKSHOPS

Title: Thinking beyond media use. How can we make sense of future media experiences?
Name: Irene Costera Meijer, John Magnus R. Dahl
Date: November 16th, 13:30 – 15:00.
Separate registration required: https://skjemaker.app.uib.no/view.php?id=13522842

Description
Media are no longer just the screens in the living room, the newspaper we pick up, or the record we put on. The media are all over our everyday world. For some time, media have been important to the constitution of our daily environments, as we have moved from using media to living in media. Younger people have taken the next step: Not only are they living in media, but media have also become integrated into their bodies, their identity and their world. Take away the smartphone from a 15-year-old, and parents will become aware how this technology is not only an important part of their world – young people are constructing their selves and making new digital worlds through their smartphones.
In this workshop we aim to make sense of this development and the consequences it may have for media scholars, media professionals and media organisations who are looking to understand the media experiences of the future. We will especially look at how teenagers use apps like Instagram, TikTok and dating apps to live in media and create digital worlds – in their specific individuality, but also to be social. You follow and share what matters for you on Instagram, you perform different trends on TikTok, and you literally put yourself out there and in touch with strangers on dating apps.
The workshop will include a brief introduction (by Irene Costera Meijer) and examples from fieldwork amongst teenagers in Norway (by John Magnus Dahl) before engaging participants in discussion on how to think beyond media use, including the development of new concepts and vocabularies.
Irene Costera Meijer is Professor of Journalism Studies and head of the Journalism Studies section at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She is a world leading journalism and media scholar having recently set the agenda for the audience turn in journalism studies. Her research appeared in many journals and books, and focuses on what news users value about journalism. She is also a professor II at the Research group for Media Use and Audience Studies of the Department of Information Science and Media Studies at University of Bergen.
Her research interests focus on audience studies and in particular on the impact of digitalization on changing practices of media consumption, media experiences and news use. When doing research she often collaborates with media organisations. This makes it easier to translate scholarly results into relevant suggestions for every day professional practices and vice versa, understanding the fundamental dilemmas of professional practices and translating these into academic publications. Costera Meijer is also on the editorial board of the academic journals Digital Journalism and Journalism Practice.
John Magnus R. Dahl is Postdoc in WP1 Understanding Media Experiences at MediaFutures. He holds a MA in Rhetoric, Argumentation and Philosophy from the University of Amsterdam and a PhD from the Department of Information Science and Media Studies at the University of Bergen.
Dahl is interested in the relationship between culture, communication, and politics in a broad sense, as well is the development of ethnographic methods within media studies and rhetoric. He is currently working on a project of how Norwegian public broadcasters relate to, or do not manage to relate to, the media experiences and social and cultural needs of young people.

Title: Synthetic Media for the Newsroom
Name: Nicholas Diakopoulos
Date: November 16th, from 15:00.
Separate registration required: https://skjemaker.app.uib.no/view.php?id=13564988

Description
Ever heard of GPT-3 or DALL-E and wondered if these new AI models for generating synthetic media could be useful in the newsroom? In this workshop we’ll demystify these technologies and explore ways in which they could be productive in various newsroom tasks. Bring your laptop for a chance to try it out and brainstorm new possibilities.
Nicholas Diakopoulos is an Associate Professor in Communication Studies and Computer Science (by courtesy) at Northwestern University where he is Director of the Computational Journalism Lab (CJL) and Director of Graduate Studies for the Technology and Social Behavior (TSB) PhD program.
Diakopoulos’ research is in computational journalism with active research projects on (1) algorithmic accountability and transparency, (2) automation and algorithms in news production, and (3) social media in news contexts. He is the author of the award-winning book Automating the News: How Algorithms are Rewriting the Media from Harvard University Press.
For some of his latest thinking and writing on automation and algorithms in journalism see his column in the Columbia Journalism Review.

PRESENTATIONS

Responsible Personalization and Recommendation: an OverviewMehdi Elahi, Associate Professor, UiB
Responsible Personalization and Recommendation: an Industry PerspectiveLars Skjærven, TV 2 & Thomas Husken, BT
Popularity Bias in RecommendationAnastasiia Klimashevskaia, PhD candidate MediaFutures
Abstract:
Personalization and recommendation empower media applications to support consumers in discovering additional media content (e.g., news articles, videos) and to keep them engaged. One of the grand challenges in this field is that common recommendation approaches may have a little potential for the discovery of new types of content for the consumers and they might cause the “popular” media content to become even more popular. Such a problem can ultimately lead to a number of undesired effects (e.g., bias in recommendation, lack of diversity). Responsible personalization and recommendation aim to address these phenomena by employing techniques to effectively model user behaviors online and fairly calibrating the output of recommendation, hence, it can cover a rich spectrum of media content.In this presentation, WP2 team will provide an overview of such a challenge and approaches to mitigate it. They will present an industry perspective towards the challenge and further discuss potential techniques to build impactful media personalization and recommendation in a responsible way.

Visual Content VerificationDuc Tien Dang Nguyen, Associate Professor, UiB
Abstract:
In this talk, Associate Professor Duc-Tien Dang-Nguyen will summarise the work done within the scope of Task 3.2 under SFI MediaFutures’ WorkPackage-3. He will briefly talk about the recent scientific publications, one of which addresses the task of deepfake media detection using AI models, and the second presents an overview of multimedia content verification in journalism. He will briefly introduce the multimedia forensics web-repository which is under development under the scope of Task 3.2.
The work on deepfake media detection proposes new AI models for automatic detection of deepfakes. The research work was accepted for publication at ACM International Conference on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing (CBMI), held in Graz, Austria in October 2022. This work was nominated for a best paper award at the conference. The second research work on visual content verification in journalism tries to present the practices being followed in the news media industry by journalists/fact-checkers to debunk visual mis/disinformation. This research work also presents a brief technical survey of available multimedia forensics tools and technologies, along with their limitations, and concludes by proposing future directions to develop better multimedia forensics tools. This research study is ready to be submitted for peer review to IEEE Access Journal.
Tien will also give a brief overview of the Web-repository which is currently under-development. The repository aims to provide several resources related to multimedia forensics at one place, including image forensics tutorials, research publications, forensics tools, widely shared debunked mis/disinformation etc.At the end of the talk, Tien will talk about other related projects, and will present next year’s plan for the Task 3.2.

Fake News DetectionGhazaal Sheikhi, Postdoc, MediaFutures
Abstract:
With the rise of concerns around misinformation threatening democracy and freedom in recent decades, fact-checking has become an integral part of journalism. Fact-checking is an extensively burdensome procedure as it requires a sequence of rigorous tasks including identifying check-worthy claims, monitoring related fact-checks, collecting reliable evidence, verifying the asserted facts, and publishing the fact-check. Considering the volume and the speed of dissemination of misleading content in today’s digital era, it is a demanding task for the fact-checking community with its limited resources and manpower. Automated fact-checking (AFC) technologies could evidently assist in expediting and scaling-up the process.
In Task 3.1, we focus on the application and advancement of natural language processing technologies in media and social media content analysis for assisting human fact-checkers and journalists. We attack the problem from a multitude of aspects including explainable check-worthy claim detection for political discourse, claim detection in Norwegian using pre-trained language models (in collaboration with Faktisk.no), named entity-based factual error correction (FEC) for biomedical information (in collaboration with the NLP Institute at the University of Stuttgart), and question answering-based factual error correction. In this talk, you will hear about these studies as well as two demos, namely TweetSearcher and ontology based FEC are also presented.

Measuring Harmful Representations in Scandinavian Language ModelsSamia Touileb, Researcher, MediaFutures
Abstract:
Scandinavian countries are perceived as role-models when it comes to gender equality. With the advent of pre-trained language models and their widespread usage, we investigate to what extent gender-based harmful and toxic content exists in selected Scandinavian language models. We examine nine models, covering Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, by manually creating template-based sentences and probing the models for completion. We evaluate the completions using two methods for measuring harmful and toxic completions and provide a thorough analysis of the results. We show that Scandinavian pre-trained language models contain harmful and gender-based stereotypes with similar values across all languages. This finding goes against the general expectations related to gender equality in Scandinavian countries and shows the possible problematic outcomes of using such models in real-world settings.

Why is SFI innovation so hard?Eivind Throndsen, Academic Liaison, Schibsted
Abstract:
A look at why it is hard to generate innovation together, thoughts on how we can overcome the difficulties, and why SFI researchers should learn Solution Selling.

Understanding news experiences with innovative methodsHallvard Moe, Professor, UiBErik Knudsen, Researcher MediaFuturesMarianne Borchgrevink-Brækhus, PhD candidate, MediaFutures
Abstract:
In this presentation we highlight some of the research and collaborations in Work Package 1 Understanding media experiences, focusing on how to understand changing news use in a tumultuous world and in a datafied media landscape. We will present two initiatives to develop novel methods for comprehensive analysis of fundamental questions regarding news use. Researcher Erik Knudsen presents a survey experiment on news avoidance and constructive journalism, developed in close collaboration with NRK and Schibsted as well as other MediaFutures partners, utilizing the DIGSSCORE research facility for innovative experiment methods. PhD candidate Marianne Borchgrevink-Brækhus presents a framework for users to safely donate browsing and social media data to research, and how this can feed into research on young people’s news use. WP co-leader professor Hallvard Moe will introduce the WP and the presentations.

Media Content Interaction & AccessibilityNjål Borch, Researcher, NORCEMorten Fjeld, Professor, UiB
Abstract:
In order to provide end users with personalised experiences that they can understand, accessibility and interactivity are crucial components. While accessibility is often understood to help users that have auditive or visual impairments, it is equally important for cognitive loads, social restrictions and personal preferences.
WP4 is working on a number of technologies to improve the end user experience and providing information in better ways. In this presentation, we will focus on the work performed in the last year, demonstrating new and hopefully exciting new ways to think of end user experiences. Radio without sound for example.

POSTERS & DEMOS

Demos and PitchesPoster Titles

The Demos and Pitches session takes place in Media City Bergen, Restaurant area from 16:15-17:00. The posters will be presented by MediaFutures (and affiliated) PhD candidates, Postdoctoral Researchers, Researchers and Master’s students.
The session will start with a 60 second pitch by each presenter, and the audience is invited to visit the posters thereafter.
Click the tabs for an overview.

Demos
Demo showing the effect of a Re-Ranker on a recommender system
Anastasiia Klimashevskaia

FootyVision, an all-in-one Model for real-time football statistical analysis with player and ball localisation.
Pete Andrews

Gamification demo based on FootyVision
Jonathan Geffen

A Demo showcasing a tool using user browser history as a baseline to easily examine news usage over a month
Marianne Borchevink-Brækhus

A showcase of the Media Forensics Repository, a repository presenting a diverse set of resources to assist journalists, fact-checkers, and the public in verifying visual user-generated content.
Sohail Ahmed Khan

A showcase for a conversational food recommender system as a mobile application
Ayoub el Majjodi

Interactive demo showcasing gender bias in norwegian BERT models
Samia Touileb

Demo showcasing EventGraph. A text-to-event framework that encodes events as graphs showing the relation between arguments, triggers, and their corresponding events.
Houlin You

LiveTweets: A framework that monitors twitter in order to find tweets relevant to an ongoing event. Developed with sports events in mind.
Ghazaal Sheiki, Daniel Rosnes

Demo showcasing recommendations based on low-lever features in the movie domain.
David Olsen

Posters
A qualitative study of Instagram as a platform for civic engagement
Tiril Amalie Johansen

Ease-read AI for people with dyslexia
Thale Knudsen Kirkhorn, Svenja Lys Forstner

News Podcasts
Kristina Hansen

Bridging the Gap of Polarized Perspectives: Changing the Thoughts of the Hard Believers in Online Communities
Jia-Hua Jeng

See or Hear? Exploring the Effect of Visual and Audio Hints and Gaze-assisted Task Feedback for Search Tasks in Augmented Reality
Yuchong Zhang

The Influence of News Recommender technology on Shaping Selective Exposure and Sharing
Khadiga Seddik

Introduction to the Datadonor tool
Erik Knudsen

News and Collaborative Filtering
Peter Klingenberg

The resposible Dating App
John Magnus R. Dahl

How Mixed and Augmented Realities Impact Our World
Adam Nowak

Media Analytics for Personalization and Advertisement
Frank Rune Espeseth

Personalization and Recommendation of Upcoming Sports Events
Sebastian Cornelius Bergh

Comparing Visual Search between Physixal Enviournments and VR
Floris van den Oever

A Collaborative System of flying and Ground Robots with Universal Physuxal Interface (PCI), and the Potential Interactive Applications.
Zimming Wang

VENUES

Atlantis Auditorium, Media City Bergen, Lars Hilles gate 30, 5008 Bergen

The dinner will be at Kulturhuset, Vaskerelven 8, 5014 Bergen

Organising committee

Ola Roth Johnsen, Admin coordinator
Anna Pacholczyk, Communication Officer
John Magnus Dahl, Postdoctoral Fellow
Are Tverberg, Team Leader, TV 2
Morten Fjeld, Professor

REGISTRATION

Photo: Jan-Petter Dahl.

MediaFutures and AI Agora Joint Seminar: The Scientific and Computational Study of Creativity with Geraint A. Wiggins, Professor at Vrije Universiteit Brussel
2022-11-01 14:15 - 16:00
Geraint A. Wiggins, Professor of Computational Creativity in the Artificial Intelligence Lab of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, will give a seminar on 1 November, at 14:15.
TITLE: The Scientific and Computational Study of Creativity
WHEN: Tuesday 1 November, 14:15-16:00.
WHERE: Store læringsrom, læringslab 3. etasje, Media City Bergen

ABSTRACT:
Creativity remains one of the most valued and the most mysterious of human (and sometimes animal) capacities. There are two particular things that make creativity difficult to study. First, it is extremely context-sensitive and subjective. Second, it is not a thing, nor a property of a thing, but rather a property of processes. Both of these properties make creativity elusive; the combination of them produces a dynamic concept which is very hard to pin down. Colton has argued that this is in some sense the correct state of affairs, in that creativity is an essentially contested concept. Geraint does not choose this emergency exit, however, and he aims to outline an alternative philosophy in this talk.
He presents a summary of selected works in creativity studies, related to philosophy, psychology, and computational creativity. He discusses the consequences of these ideas for computational creativity studies, and the related opportunities for the human sciences. He finishes with a set of desiderata for computationally creative systems, in terms of both implementation and behaviour, which themselves may form hypotheses for scientific study of human creativity.
BIO:
Geraint A. Wiggins studied Mathematics and Computer Science at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and holds PhDs in Artificial Intelligence and in Musical Composition, from the University of Edinburgh. He is Professor of Computational Creativity in the Artificial Intelligence Lab of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Previously, he was Head of the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London. He is Associate Editor (English) of Musicae Scientiae, the journal of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, a consulting editor of Music Perception and an editorial board member of the Journal of New Music Research. From 2000 to 2004, he chaired the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour, the UK learned society for Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, and from 2004 to 2014, he chaired the international Association for Computational Creativity, of whose Journal he is now Editor-in-Chief. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is the Founding Chair of the Dilys Trust, a charity that helps intellectually able but economically disadvantaged young people in the UK attend top class universities.Geraint has worked in artificial intelligence, computer music, and cognitive science since 1984. He was one of the founders of the research field of computational creativity, which studies creative intelligence, and was the first in the world to hold a named professorial chair in that research area. His current work relates to cognitive architectures that explicate the relationship between perception, learning and creativity, in sequential domains, most notably language and music.

MediaFutures and AI Agora Joint Seminar: Understanding Trust and Conversational Agent with Jonas Ivarsson, Professor at the University of Gothenburg
2022-11-01 13:15 - 14:00
Jonas Ivarsson, Professor at the University of Gothenburg, will give a seminar on 1 November, at 13:15.
TITLE: Understanding Trust and Conversational Agent
WHEN: Tuesday 1 November, 13:15-14:00.
WHERE: Store læringsrom, læringslab 3. etasje, Media City Bergen

ABSTRACT:
In recent years, the field of natural language processing has seen substantial developments resulting in robust voice-based interactive services. The quality of the voice and interactivity are sometimes so good that the artificial cannot be differentiated from real persons. Thus, discerning whether an interactional partner is a human or an artificial agent is no longer merely a theoretical question but also a practical problem facing people of ordinary society. Consequently, the ‘Turing test’ has moved from the laboratory into the wild. The passage from the theoretical to the practical domain also accentuates understanding as a topic of continued inquiry. When interactions are successful, but the artificial agent has not been identified as such, can it also be said that the interlocutors have understood each other? In what ways do understanding figure in real-world human–computer interactions? The argument will be made that we need two parallel conceptions of understanding to address these questions. By departing from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, it is illustrated how parties in a conversation regularly deploy two forms of analysis (categorical and sequential) to understand their interactional partner. The interplay between these forms of analysis shapes the developing sense of interactional exchanges and is crucial for established relations. Furthermore, outside of experimental settings, any problems of identifying and categorizing an interactional partner raise concerns regarding trust and suspicion. When suspicion is roused, shared understanding becomes disrupted. The address thus concludes that the proliferation of conversational systems, fueled by artificial intelligence, may have unintended consequences, including its impacts on human–human interactions.
BIO:
Jonas Ivarsson is a professor of informatics. He started in cognitive science and communication studies before moving to education. In 2013 he became a professor of education, where his research focused on the role of various technologies in developing knowledge and competence.
In 2019 he moved to Informatics at the Department of Applied Information Technology at the University of Gothenburg. There, his role is to take the lead on the emerging research on Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence—a specific approach to the interplay between humans and machines in the context of artificial intelligence. Central to this approach are questions relating to how to design AI systems to operate in the context of human users and how to design learning trajectories of humans so that they can intelligently interact with increasingly complex semi-autonomous systems.

Hackathon
2022-10-20 - 2022-10-21
When:
Date and time:20. October from 13:0021. October from 09:00Location: Media City Bergen
What:
We are arranging a hackathon in Bergen the 20-21st October. We will have one and a half days (and an evening with pizza & coding), and we’ll try to create some new and interesting experiments or demonstrations.
If you have any ideas, please summarize quickly and send to njbo@norceresearch.no.
It’s also important that we have the necessary datasets as well, so have that in mind!
Current ideas:– Automatic subtitles using Whisper. We’ve already done some work on this (both TV and podcasts), and will try to focus more on visualizations and end user experience. What could be products using this technology and for what content?– Football visualizations of automatically detected information. Pete creates datasets tracking and positioning players and the ball – how can we use this to make added value services that are interesting for viewers? Games? Additional information?– Compare different subtitles? Are summarized subtitles better than verbatim? Are “fancysubs” that provide information about who speaks easier to read or comprehend? We have at least one good eye tracker available for this.
Contact: Njål Borch, WP 4 leader, njbo@norceresearch.no
Register: https://skjemaker.app.uib.no/view.php?id=13533119
Photo credit: Be-novative

MediaFutures Seminar: Media Accessibility: Current Solutions and Future Challenges with Pilar Orero, Professor from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
2022-10-04 13:00 - 14:00 | MediaFutures HQ, 3rd Floor, Tower 1, Media City, Media Futures HQ, 3rd floor, Bergen, 5008
Pilar Orero, Professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain), will give a seminar on 4 October, at 13:00.
TITLE: MedIa Accessibility: Current Solutions and Future Challenges
WHEN: Tuesday 4 October, 13:00-14:00. There will be a lunch served at 12:30.
WHERE: MediaFutures & Online
Zoom Meetinghttps://uib.zoom.us/j/64942261686?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 649 4226 1686Password: [REDACTED]
ABSTRACT:
The presentation will start describing the current situation of media accessibility, which is at an unprecedented moment for accessibility. The EU legal framework has forced national transpositions with concrete requirements. The European Accessibility Centre will open next year, and funding for research by EC is at all times high. Accessibility has moved from being an object of study, as a silo, to a horizontal prerequisite in any call where humans are involved. This presentation will inform of existing funded solutions and identify possible challenges that may need funding.
BIO:
Professor Pilar Orero, PhD (UMIST, UK) works at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain) in the TransMedia Catalonia Lab. She has written and edited many books, near 100 academic papers and almost the same number of book chapters –all on Media Accessibility. Leader and participant on numerous EU funded research projects focusing on media accessibility. She works in standardisation and participates in the UN ITU IRG-AVA – Intersector Rapporteur Group Audiovisual Media Accessibility, ISO and ANEC. She has been working on Immersive Accessibility for the past 4 years first in a project called ImAc, which results are now further developed in TRACTION, MEDIAVERSE, MILE, and has just started to work on green accessibility in GREENSCENT. She leads the EU network LEADME on Media Accessibility.
For more info please go to https://gent.uab.cat/pilarorero

Innovation Workshop with Sofie Hvitved
2022-09-30 09:00 - 12:00
We are pleased to invite you to a half-day innovation workshop on 30. September, 2022, at Media City Bergen. The workshop is targeted towards academics and industry personnel involved in various levels at MediaFutures.
The workshop has the following goals:
– Get an overview of different methods, processes and definitions for innovation
– Understanding futuredriven innovation
– Facilitating a knowledge sharing process preferably ending in some kind of shared understanding of the term ‘innovation’ in relation to the media and media tech industry
The workshop will be led and facilitated by Sofie Hvidtved from Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies. She is Head of Media at the Institute and is strongly engaged in the intersection between media and technology, where she works with the development and execution of strategy and innovation projects. More information about Sofie Hvitved (cifs.dk).
There are 30 places available for the workshop and we have chosen to reserve 15 places for academic and 15 for industry partners.
We will inform you about who has gotten a place by Friday 16th September.
Date and time: 30. September 09:00-12:00
Place: Medielabben, Media City Bergen
Deadline for signing up: Thursday 15th September
Sign up by filling out this form: https://skjemaker.app.uib.no/view.php?id=13281998

MediaFutures Seminar: Building Knowledge Graphs with Media Content and Application for Tackling Misinformation with Raphael Troncy, Associate Professor at EURECOM
2022-09-20 10:00 - 11:00 | MediaFutures HQ, 3rd Floor, Tower 1, Media City, Media Futures HQ, 3rd floor, Bergen, 5008
Raphael Troncy, Associate Professor at EURECOM, will give a seminar on 20 September, at 10:00.
TITLE: Building Knowledge Graphs with Media Content and Application for Tackling Misinformation
WHEN: Tuesday 20 September, 10:00-11:00WHERE: MCB Store læringsrom, Læringslab 3rd floor. / ZOOM:
https://uib.zoom.us/j/67861782423?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 678 6178 2423
Password: [REDACTED]

ABSTRACT:
The sheer volume of multimedia content created every day across the many disparate distribution channels keeps challenging any traditional content management system. Routine tasks such as archiving, editing, content organization and retrieval by multimedia creators become prohibitively costly. On the user side, the amount of multimedia content pumped daily can be simply overwhelming and the need for shorter and more personalized content has never been more pronounced. Recommending, enriching and summarizing content can help to capitalize on users’ engagement and generate their interactions.In this talk, I will first present several Knowledge Graphs developed with medias being radio and TV programs broadcaster in Europe, news items published by a news agency or even social media posts shared on Twitter or Facebook. Next, I will present a number of tools that contribute to automatic multimedia understanding by computers, ranging from extracting topics using common sense knowledge or language models to recognizing recurring people in images. I will show how difficult it is for computers to decompose content into meaningful segments. I will show how to extract highlights from media content, both for narrative-focused summarization and for maximising memorability and I will conclude with our current efforts aiming at tackling misinformation.
BIO:
Raphael Troncy is an Associate Professor at the Data Science Department of EURECOM. He received his PhD from Grenoble University (France) in 2004 and held research positions at INA (France), CNR (Italy) and CWI (The Netherlands). He published more than 250 scientific papers in various journals, top tier conferences and associated workshops and held key organisational roles in multiple world-leading conferences. He was the General Chair of The Web Conference in 2022. He is an expert in knowledge engineering, information extraction and recommender systems. He is the principla investigator of many national and european projects where semantic technologies and information extraction are used together to build knowledge graphs, exploratory search engines and recommender systems.

MORS: Workshop on Multi-Objective Recommender Systems
2022-09-18 - 2022-09-23
When:
18. – 23. September 2022

What:
The 2nd workshop on Multi-Objective Recommender Systems (MORS) will be held in Seattle, USA in conjunction with the 16th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. The workshop, with the aim of the gathering researchers and industry experts to discuss the significance and complications of incorporating multiple objectives into the recommender systems, will take place between September 18th and 23rd (exact date to be announced).
Associate Professor Mehdi Elahi at the University of Bergen, and MediaFutures Work Package 2 leader is one of the organizers of the workshop, along with:

Himan Abdollahpouri (Spotify, USA)

Shaghayegh Sahebi (University at Albany, State University of New York, USA)

Masoud Mansoury (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)

Babak Loni (ING group, Netherlands)

Zahra Nazari (Spotify, USA)

Maria Dimakopoulou (Spotify, USA)

The theme of this year’s workshop is Long-term Optimization in Recommender Systems. The organizers now invite submissions of papers on the following topics:

Recommender systems with multiple objectives

Balancing the long-term impacts of the recommendations and the users’ short-term preferences

Reinforcement Learning for long-term optimization in recommender systems

Feedback loops and the impact of recommendations in long term

Value-aware recommendation (profit, value, purpose, etc.)

The trade-off between relevance and bias in recommender systems

Recommendation with multiple stakeholders

Conflict handling in multi-stakeholder recommendation

Fairness-aware recommender systems

You can read more about the workshop:

https://sites.google.com/view/mors-2022/home
https://recsys.acm.org/recsys22/mors/

For updates regarding the workshop, follow @MORS 2022
More information about the 16th ACM Conference can be found here.

MediaFutures Seminar: How Newspapers Use Audience Analytics and Metrics with Thomas Husken, Data Analyst at Bergens Tidende
2022-09-09 12:00 - 13:00 | MediaFutures HQ, 3rd Floor, Tower 1, Media City, Media Futures HQ, 3rd floor, Bergen, 5008
Thomas Husken, Data Analyst at Bergens Tidende, will give a seminar on 9 September, at 12:00.
TITLE: How newspapers use audience analytics and metrics
WHEN: Friday 9 September, 12:00-13:00WHERE: MediaFutures

In this workshop, Thomas Husken, data scientist in Bergens Tidende (BT), will talk about the usage of news audience data, various metrics, and analytics inside a news organization. Thomas is part of BT data analytics department, working on frontpage optimization, creation and maintenance of various analytical dashboards, and many other analytical tasks. Newsrooms around the world have become centered around dashboards, overloaded with metrics, and news work is growingly data-driven. Ongoing research is revealing how analytics and metrics influences journalism culture, work routines, news values, news selection, among other. However, beyond gaining knowledge about effects on work process which are reflected in content that consumers of media get, we need to look deeper into technical insides of audience analytics and metrics, or infrastructures for utilization of data about audience news use. In that respect, Thomas Husken will provide unique insights into the audience analytics and metrics in BT as one of the oldest and the largest newspapers (measured by circulation) in Norway.
The workshop is primarily aimed at PhD and Postodoctoral researchers, but also at others interested in various technological aspects of media work.

Program:
Short introduction – Ana Milojevic (Postdoc Fellow, MediaFutures)
How newspapers use analytics and metrics – Thomas Husken (Data Scientist, BT)
Questions and answers

Register your interest in workshop by sending e-mail to Ana Milojevic.

Visual Computing Forum: The Future of Mobile Interaction with Prof. Morten Fjeld
2022-09-09 10:15 - 11:15
TITLE: The Future of Mobile Interaction
WHEN: Friday 9 September, 10:15-11:15WHERE:510N3 (Blåbær), 5th Floor, Thormøhlens Gate 55, Høyteknologisenteret
Zoom: https://uib.zoom.us/j/67048590477?pwd=[REDACTED]
ABSTRACT:

The use of computerized devices is now ubiquitous in many societies. Our daily lives are shaped by perpetually changing interactive devices and applications, from touch-based smartwatches and tablets to large digital displays. Yet while smart devices, such as laptops, pads, and smartphones, are mobile, their users are typically either stationary or risking their physical safety using such devices while in- motion. The health effects of today’s mobile devices are well-documented. These effects include the impact of a predominantly sedentary lifestyle on both health and well-being of many individuals. This talk will present high-risk thinking, design, and engineering research into the domain on mobile user interaction.
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY:

Morten Fjeld is a professor of Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Bergen (Norway) and Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden). His research activities are situated in the field of Human- Computer Interaction with a focus on tangible and tabletop user computing. In 2005, he founded the t2i Interaction Lab at Chalmers, Sweden. He holds a dual MSc degree in applied mathematics from NTNU (Trondheim, Norway) and ENSIMAG (Grenoble, France), and a PhD from ETH (Zurich, Switzerland). In 2002, Morten Fjeld received the ETH Medal for his PhD titled “Designing for Tangible Interaction”. In 2011, he was a visiting professor at NUS Singapore, in 2016 and 2017 at Tohoku University, Japan, and in 2019 to 2020 at ETH Zurich. Morten Fjeld also has extensive industrial experience in the areas of fluid mechanics, simulators, and user interface design.
Full bio: https://www.uib.no/personer/Morten.Fjeldt2i Lab Norway: http://t2i.not2i Lab Sweden: http://t2i.sehttps://dblp.org/pid/f/MortenFjeld.html https://scholar.google.no/citations?user=ZQhqxscAAAAJ&hl=sv&oi=ao

MediaFutures Seminar: Mind the Gaps and Normal Accidents with Dirk Hovy. Associate Professor, Bocconi University in Milan, Italy.
2022-06-16 14:00 - 15:00
Dirk Hovy, Associate Professor of computer science at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy, will give a seminar on 16 June, at 14:00.
TITLE: Mind the Gaps and Normal AccidentsWHEN: Thursday 16 June, 14:00-15:00WHERE: Zoom – https://uio.zoom.us/j/61874196241?pwd=[REDACTED]

Meeting ID: 618 7419 6241

Password: [REDACTED]

ABSTRACT:
NLP is now stable enough to be used in production systems, and will soon become even more pervasive. However, even today’s systems are already highly complex and unpredictable. As they become more ubiquitous, different algorithms will interact with each other directly leading to tightly coupled systems whose capacity to cause harm we will be unable to predict. In his book Normal Accidents, the sociologist Charles Perrow proposed a framework to analyze technologies and their risks according to their complexity and the interdependence of their components. He showed that accidents were nigh on unavoidable due to those two features. We apply Perrow’s framework to NLP to assess its potential risks. We argue that under the current paradigm, “normal accidents” are built into the system, and that it is only a matter of time before they emerge. Some issues in current NLP practice that aid this development are:
– the early adoption of methods without sufficient understanding or analysis;
– the preference for computational methods regardless of risks associated with their limitations;
– the dangers of unexplainable methods.
If these issues are not addressed, we risk a loss of reproducibility, reputability, and subsequently public trust in our field. However, these factors can help us plan better for making our systems safer and more reliable.
BIO:
Dirk Hovy is associate professor of computer science at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. Before that, he was faculty and a postdoc in Copenhagen, got a PhD from USC, and a linguistics masters in Germany. He is interested in the interaction between language, society, and machine learning, or what language can tell us about society, and what computers can tell us about language. He has authored over 70 articles on these topics, including 3 best paper awards. He has organized one conference and several workshops (on abusive language, ethics in NLP, and computational social science). Dirk recently received an ERC Starting Grant for a project on demographic factors and bias in NLP. Outside of work, Dirk enjoys cooking, running, and leather-crafting. For updated information, see https://www.dirkhovy.com

MediaFutures Seminar: Augment the Vision: To Help Users Deal with Different Domain Tasks. PhD Candidate, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden.
2022-06-15 12:00 - 13:00
Yuchong Zhang, PhD candidate at the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, will give a seminar on 15 June, at 12:00.
TITLE: Augment the Vision: To Help Users Deal with Different Domain TasksWHEN: Wednesday 15 June, 12:00-13:00WHERE: MediaFutures

ABSTRACT:
One of the cutting-edge techniques—augmented reality (AR) (a variation of virtual reality (VR)), in which virtual objects are superimposed in the real world–has been demonstrated and applied in numerous fields due to its capability of providing interactive interfaces of visualized digital content. Moreover, AR can provide functional tools that support users undertaking domain-related tasks, especially facilitating them in data visualization and interaction because of its ability to jointly augment the physical space and the user’s perception. How to fully use the advantages of AR technique, especially the items which augment human vision to help users with different domain tasks’ perform is the central part of my PhD research.
BIO:
Yuchong Zhang is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. His research interests include augmented reality, interactive visualization and human-centred design. He received his MSc. degree from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in 2017.

MediaFutures WP1 DIGSSCORE-Workshop
2022-06-15 10:00 - 13:00
WP1 DIGSSCORE-Workshop
Open for all MediaFutures Partners. The first part will be in English, and the second part will be in Norwegian/Scandinavian.
WHERE: Zoom – https://uib.zoom.us/j/65597060274?pwd=[REDACTED]

Part 1 (10:00 – 11:00) Introduction to DIGSSCORE
10:00-10:05: Welcome
10:05-10:45: Introduction to DIGSSCORE by Erik Knudsen: What is it and what can MediaFutures partners use it for? (20 minutes presentation and 20 minutes for questions)
10:45-11:00 Coffee break
Part 2 (11:00-13:00) WP1 workshop in Scandinavian (with WP1 partners)
11:00-11:15: Introduction to Schibsted’s research interests on hard-to-reach audiences and constructive journalism (10 minutes presentation and 5 minutes for questions)
11:15-11:30: Introduction to NRK’s research interests on constructive journalism (10 minutes presentation and 5 minutes for questions).
11:30-11:45: Discussing and finding overlapping interests for research
11:45-12:00 Coffee break
12:00-12:15: Opportunities for researching constructive journalism and hard-to-reach audiences using DIGSSCORE.
12:15-12:45: Designing the study
12:45-13:00: Summing up and the road ahead

Future Week. MediaFutures Workshop: Towards Responsible Media Technology & Innovation
2022-06-09 09:30 - 12:00
As part of the Media City Bergen Future Week, MediaFutures will hold workshop on June 9.
TITLE: Towards Responsible Media Technology & Innovation
WHEN: Thursday 9 June, 09:30-12:00WHERE: Media City Bergen
REGISTRATION: https://mediacitybergen.no/future-week-22/
In this workshop, you will learn from MediaFutures’ young researchers in five work packages how new media technologies for media user engagement, media content production, media content interaction and accessibility, and audience understanding are developed and advanced to the next level. No matter if you are a journalist, a media practitioner, a developer, a researcher, or a curious individual, you will open a new horizon before you on responsible media technology and innovation.

The topics we’ll touch upon during the workshop are:
– Understanding media experience– User Modeling, Personalization & – Engagement– Media Content Analysis and – Production– Media Content Interaction & Accessibility– Norwegian Language Technologies

Program:
1. Christoph Trattner (Center Director): Opening and welcome speech
2. Mehdi Elahi (Associate Prof./WP Leader, WP2): “Research on Responsible Recommendation”
3. Jonathan Geffen (PhD Candidate, WP4): “Playing the News – Newsgames 101”
4. Ana Milojevic (Postdoc Fellow, WP1): “Connecting Media and Users – Analytics and Metrics ”
5. Coffee Break
6. Sohail Ahmed Khan (PhD Candidate, WP3): “Visual Content Verification in Era of Deepfakes”
7. Huiling You (PhD Candidate, WP5): “Event Extraction from News Articles”
8. Round table discussion
9. Wrap-up

Wolftech & MediaFutures Joint Seminar: Human Interaction and Collaboration with Machine Learning Models. Hendrik Strobelt, IBM Research / MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab
2022-05-20 15:00 - 16:00
Hendrik Strobelt, the Explainability Lead at the MIT-IBM Watson AI lab, will give a seminar on 20 May, at 15:00.
TITLE: Human Interaction and Collaboration with Machine Learning models
WHEN: Friday 20 May, 15:00-16:00WHERE: Zoom:
https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZErdeiurz0tGtGEcOjhfEQBEwTKqcblgjju
Meeting ID:

Password:

[REDACTED]
With the increasing adoption of machine learning models across domains, we have to think about the human role when interacting with these models. In the last years, my collaborators and I have created a series of tools that utilize visualization and visual user interaction to help investigate behavior of machine learning models (for NLP and CV) and that might help creating algorithms to detect fake text. I will present a selection of these scientific tools that makes humans play and then understand.
BIO:
Hendrik Strobelt is the Explainability Lead at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, Research Scientist at IBM Research, and currently professor at University of Konstanz. His recent research is on visualization for and human collaboration with AI models to foster explainability and intuition. His work involves NLP models and generative models while he is advocating to utilize a mix of data modalities to solve real-world problems. His research is applied to tasks in machine learning, in NLP, in the biomedical domain, and in chemistry. Hendrik joined IBM in 2017 after postdoctoral positions at Harvard SEAS and NYU Tandon. He received a Ph.D. (Dr. rer. nat.) from the University of Konstanz in computer science (Visualization) and holds an MSc (Diplom) in computer science from TU Dresden. His work has been published at venues like IEEE VIS, ICLR, ACM Siggraph, ACL, NeurIPS, ICCV, PNAS, Nature BME, or Science Advances. He received multiple best paper/honorable mention awards at EuroVis, BioVis, VAST, ACL Demo, or NeurIPS demo. He received the Lohrmann medal from TU Dresden as the highest student honor. Hendrik has served in program committees and organization committees for IEEE VIS, BioVis, EuroVis. He served on organization committees for IEEE VIS, VISxAI, ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS. Hendrik is visiting researcher at MIT CSAIL. (more: https://hendrik.strobelt.com)

MediaFutures Seminar: Media entertainment experiences among youth on global platforms. Marika Lüders, Professor at the University of Oslo
2022-05-13 12:00 - 13:00
Marika Lüders, Professor at the University of Oslo, will give a seminar on 13 May, at 12:00.
TITLE: Media entertainment experiences among youth on global platformsWHEN: Friday 13 May, 12:00-13:00WHERE: Zoom –
https://uib.zoom.us/j/68002953641?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 680 0295 3641

Password: [REDACTED]

ABSTRACT:
The media and platforms taken for granted by those born since the turn of the millennium are often interpreted as causing unprecedented competition for national and legacy players in the field of media entertainment. Accordingly, notions such as “lost generation” signal how legacy media perceive re-engagement with youth audiences as core to their future existence. In this talk I will first address how the notion of youth as a lost generation serves a strategic function in the media entertainment sector by legitimating actions. I will next report from how we study teens’ media entertainment experiences in the research project “Global Natives? Serving young audiences on global platforms”. By enquiring the media entertainment experiences of youth as constituted by content produced by legacy media and what is often termed “social media entertainment”, we hope to advance knowledge on youth as a media generation.
BIO:
Marika Lüders is a Professor at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo. She has almost 20 years of experience in researching user/audience experiences, social media, global platforms, and the intersections of the material and experiential levels of digital technologies. Lüders is currently the project leader of the research project “Global Natives? Serving young audiences on global platforms” (2021-2025).

Human-Computer Interaction lecture series: UX Research Design in Practice: Some Examples from Safety Critical Industrial Environments. Dr Duy Le, senior research scientist at VNUHCM University of Science, Vietnam
2022-05-04 14:15 - 15:00
Dr. Duy Le, a senior research scientist and head of the Human-Computer Interaction division of SELab, VNUHCM University of Science, Vietnam, will give a seminar on May 4, at 14:15.
TITLE: UX Research Design in Practice: Some Examples from Safety Critical Industrial Environments
WHEN: Wednesday 4 May, 14:15-15:00WHERE: MediaFutures and Zoom:
https://uib.zoom.us/j/69626023560?pwd=[REDACTED]

Meeting ID: 696 2602 3560
Password: [REDACTED]

ABSTRACT:
A typical user experience (UX) research and design process is a sequence of user empathization, problem definition, solution ideation, designing, and evaluation. However, how this sequence is executed in practice can have several variants, heavily depending on the resources and the constraints of the environment where the UX work is performed. In this talk, we will explore some exemplary UX research and design projects targeting manufacturing plants, which are examples of safety critical industrial environments. The talk will highlight some particular contextual constraints in this kind of environment and then present how UX practitioners flexibly applied the typical design process to comply with the constraints while still adequately ensuring the quality of a user-centered design work. Besides that, the talk will also demonstrate how different types of creative media such as storyboard, paper-sketched user interfaces, animated mockups, and games can be flexibly used in industrial UX research and design projects.
BIO:
Dr. Duy Le is currently a senior research scientist and head of the human-computer interaction division of SELab, VNUHCM University of Science, Vietnam. He is an HCI researcher with rich working experiences both in academia and industry. He obtained a PhD degree in human-computer interaction from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. Prior to joining VNUHCM University of Science, he had two years working as a research scientist in the UX research group of ABB Research Sweden where he performed several UX research projects spanning across human-robot interaction, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and human-automation interaction. In his current position, Duy is leading research on intelligent interactive systems, which aim to combine user-centered design, artificial intelligence and cutting edge interactive technologies such as interactive surfaces, AR, VR, and embodied interfaces to improve user efficacy and provide novel experiences.

Human-Computer Interaction lecture series: Visual Attention in Face-to-Face and Computer-Mediated Interactions. Katarzyna Wisiecka, PhD Candidate in Psychology and Informatics at SWPS University & Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology.
2022-05-04 11:15 - 12:00
Katrzyna Wisiecka, PhD candidate in psychology and informatics at SWPS University & Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology, will give a seminar on May 4th, at 11:15.
TITLE: Visual Attention in Face-to-Face and Computer-Mediated Interactions
WHEN: Wednesday 4 May, 11:15-12:00WHERE: MediaFutures and Zoom:
https://uib.zoom.us/j/61410167655?pwd=[REDACTED]

Meeting ID: 614 1016 7655
Password: [REDACTED]

ABSTRACT:
Computer-mediated interaction has become an integral part of our daily routines. Despite decreased non-verbal communication and face-to-face contact with partners of collaboration, people learned how to remotely work together. The consequences of decreased non-verbal signals such as gaze communication on collaboration quality in remote settings are however not fully investigated. The present PhD project intends to examine in four eye tracking experiments the role of visual attention during face-to-face and computer-mediated interaction. The project has three interrelated aims: (1) examining the relationship between interaction quality and gaze patterns in remote and face-to-face collaboration; (2) facilitating workspace awareness among collaborators by visualization of the partner’s gaze direction; (3) investigate whether gaze communication enhances physiological synchronization measured by heart rate variability (HRV) in computer-mediated collaboration. Current results suggest that remote collaboration is challenging for participants and its quality benefits from gaze visualizations during task solving. Enhancing gaze communication during remote collaboration has the potential to increase physiological synchronization between collaborators. Broadening the knowledge about physiological correlates of computer-mediated collaboration is a step to develop gaze-based solutions tailored to remote interactions.
BIO:
Katarzyna Wisiecka, M.A. in clinical psychology, current PhD candidate in psychology and informatics at SWPS University & Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology. She is a member of the Eye Tracking Research Center at SWPS University. Her main research interests include social synchronization and gaze communication in computer environments. She is a scholarship holder in grants funded by the National Science Center and National Centre for Research and Development in Poland. She also takes part in numerous international projects including media accessibility and human-computer interaction such as LEAD-ME funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the EU.

MediaFutures Seminar: Fairness—Are algorithms a burden or a solution? Dr. Christine Bauer, Assistant Professor at Utrecht University
2022-04-21 13:00 - 14:00
Dr. Christine Bauer, Assistant Professor at Utrecht University, will give a seminar on 21 April, at 13:00.
TITLE: Fairness—Are algorithms a burden or a solution?WHEN: Thursday 21 April, 13:00-14:00WHERE: Zoom –
https://uib.zoom.us/j/66369080035?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 663 6908 0035

Password: [REDACTED]

ABSTRACT:
Recommender systems play an important role in everyday life. These systems assist users in choosing products to buy, movies to watch, or news articles to read. With their wide usage, there is an increasing pressure that such systems are fair. Besides serving diverse groups of users, recommenders need to represent and serve item providers in a fair manner, too. But what is fair? In this talk, I will present research on fairness in music recommender systems taking the artists’ perspective. What do artists consider fair? Are algorithms a burden or a solution? In particular, I will zoom in on recent research on gender bias in music recommenders and how we can address this issue.
BIO:
Dr. Christine Bauer is an Assistant Professor at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. She is an experienced teacher in a wide spectrum of topics in computing and information systems—ranging from algorithms to adaptive interactive systems to research methods. Her research activities center on interactive intelligent systems. Thereby, she takes a human-centered computing approach, where technology follows humans’ and society’s needs. Central themes in her research are context and context-adaptivity. In the recent years, she worked on context-aware recommender systems. Core interest in her current research activities are fairness and multi-method evaluations. Further information can be found at https://christinebauer.eu.

UiB AI #2 But, why? - make AI answer!
2022-04-08 10:00 - 12:00
Welcome to the second seminar in the UiB AI seminar series. The event is open to all employees and students at UiB. Prior registration is required.
TITLE: UiB AI #2 But, why? – make AI answer!
WHEN: Friday 8 April, 10:00-12:00WHERE: Universitetsaulaen, Muséplassen 3, Bergen
Seminar registration
Background:
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly involved in decision making. Decision-making can be a monotonous task that involves a lot of routine operations and the processing of vast amounts of information. Involving artificial intelligence is a possibility to spare human time and allow for it to be used in a more meaningful way, both for society and for the individuals involved.
Decisions by AI can mean many different things. On one hand, machine learning is used to identify who is most likely to pass the exam, how much your house will be appraised for, or how likely malignant that spot is on your mammography image. On the other hand, automated decision-makers are built to follow a specific set of rules. When a decision affects our life, we would like to know how and why that decision was made. Knowing why helps scientists and engineers improve the automated decision-making tools. It also helps individuals to retain their autonomy. If you do not know why, you cannot possibly do anything to change a decision. Not knowing why makes the personal experience the same as being subjected to a roll of a dice deciding the value of your property and the quality of your life.
To explain means to provide information about a process that is meaningful, useful and understandable to the person for whom it is intended. Not all AI methods `shed’ enough information for a meaningful explanation to be feasible. It is not that the why exists somewhere and the AI method would not admit to it. Machine learning algorithms produce models of correlations in the data. The data is a numerical representation of the real world. There might be a reason in the real world why two phenomena are related. A machine learning model can correctly identify that relation without having access to, or making use of, the reasons for it. AI methods that rely on symbolic representations by design produce `reason based’ decisions. However, those reasons are not explanations, just the material from which explanations are built.
How do we build AI that explains its decisions? There are numerous challenges to be addressed both in providing material for explanations and constructing explanations. Ultimately, some AI approaches would always be more explanation friendly than others. One can break a walnut with a sledgehammer, but we do not use sledgehammers for this purpose because they tend to destroy the walnut. Analogously, an AI approach can be used for a decision-making purpose, but its explainability should be matched with a consideration of what impact do the produced decisions have. Otherwise, we risk breaking something we cherish.
In this seminar we will describe how AI – sees the world and makes decisions. We will elucidate what happens when we say the AI reasons and the AI learns. We will discuss how researchers are trying to change different AI methods to gain more explainability from AI.
BIO:
Samia Touileb is a researcher at MediaFutures working on Norwegian Language Technologies. Her main research interests are information extraction, sentiment analysis, bias and fairness in NLP, and applications of NLP and machine learning methods to tasks within social science research. She holds a PhD in Information Science with a focus on Natural Language Processing (NLP) from the University of Bergen, was a Postdoc at the Language Technology Group at the University of Oslo, and has been working within research in and applications of AI and NLP for almost a decade.
Ghazaal Sheikhi is a Postdoctoral Fellow at MediaFutures. Her research interests revolve around machine learning, natural language processing and textual content analysis. She holds a PhD in Computer engineering (Machine Learning) from Eastern Mediterranean University, North Cyprus and a master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology, Teheran, Iran.

MediaFutures Seminar: Detecting Fake News by Using Weakly Supervised Learning. Assoc. Prof. Özlem Özgöbek
2022-03-17 13:00 - 14:00
Dr. Özlem Özgöbek, Associate Professor at NTNU, Norway will give a seminar on 17 March, at 13:00.
TITLE: Detecting Fake News by Using Weakly Supervised LearningWHEN: Thursday 17 March, 13:00-14:00WHERE: Zoom –
https://uib.zoom.us/j/64607939290?pwd=[REDACTED]
Meeting ID: 646 0793 9290

Password: [REDACTED]

ABSTRACT:
Spread and existence of fake news has been amplified by the advancements in internet and social media. Today, it is one of the most important problems that affects the society. Various artificial intelligence methods have been used to address the automatic detection of fake news. However, the complex and dynamic nature of news makes this task challenging. In this talk, I’m going to address some of these challenges and present an ongoing work on fake news detection by using weakly supervised learning.
BIO:
Dr. Özlem Özgöbek works as an associate professor at the Department of Computer Science at NTNU. Her research focuses on recommender systems, privacy issues in recommender systems and disinformation detection for online news. She is a co-founder of Norwegian Big Data Symposium (NOBIDS) and actively involved in organizing INRA workshop series since 2014.
