Natali Helberger was one of the keynote speakers during the ACM Conference Series on Recommender Systems (RecSys) 2021, where she delivered a keynote on Regulating Recommenders.
Recommenders are the power engines of the digital society. They order and unlock information online, manage our attention, make and break businesses and control the constant flow of information and disinformation. So much power over markets and society cannot escape the attention of regulators, and in the past year the European Commission has launched into a series of ambitious initiatives to set a (world-wide) standard of dealing with the potential risks and opportunities of recommendation algorithms. While the draft Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act very much focus on recommenders controlled by Very Large Online Platform, other initiatives such as the draft AI Regulation or the Data Governance Act pertain to setting the conditions for the operation of recommenders more broadly. In her presentation prof. Helberger mapped this emerging landscape of rules and regulations and offered some critical reflections of how they will shape recommender design in the years to come.
Please find the presentation on Regulating Recommenders here.