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Ethics, Data Science, and Public Service Media

Ethics, Data Science, and Public Service Media

In this talk, I will look at the contributions public service media organizations can play in the emerging understanding of the responsible and ethical practice of data science. We will look at some specific project examples: what works and where we can improve.

Among them are automatic decision-making processes, as they need to come to Public Service Medias (PSM) because they represent some competitive advantage and competitive potential. But PSM are about making sure that people have a shared understanding of the world around them. How can you balance these two different expectations?

By the end of the talk, the audience should have examples and principals they can apply in their own data science practice.

As presented at EGG london 2019

Ben Fields

July 02, 2019
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  1. Ethics, Data Science, and Public Service Media | EGG London

    | 2 July 2019 The Case for Public Service Recommender Algorithms Ben Fields, Rhianne Jones, Tim Cowlishaw BBC London ￿[email protected] ABSTRACT In this position paper we lay out the role for public service or- ganisations within the fairness, accountability, and transparency discourse. We explore the idea of public service algorithms and what role they might play, especially with recommender systems. We then describe a research agenda for public service recommendation systems. 1 INTRODUCTION In traditional commercial applications of recommender systems, the goal is a straightforward extension of an organisation’s overall commercial aims. This leads to a focus on designing and optimising recommender systems that above all else improve overall revenue (via increased purchasing) or in the case of a subscription service, increased engagement (via increased consumption of items, e.g. listens for songs, views for short video). However, for a class of organisations that answer to the public rather than shareholders, a di￿erent drive exists: public service. Whilst there is no single de￿nition of what constitutes public service motivations, there are several ways in which the notion of public service enshrines the principles of Fairness, Accountability and Transparency (FAT) and presents an opportunity for novel ways to design recommender algorithms, challenging the orthodoxy of commercial applications of this technology. 2 CONTEXT Using data to deliver personalised services to audiences has be- come a key strategic priority for many Public Service Broadcasters across Europe [7]. However the increasing use of algorithmic rec- ommendations and personalisation in Public Service Media (PSM), speci￿cally in journalism, has surfaced concerns about the poten- tial risk these models pose for PSM values like universality and diversity, through the potential to undermine shared and collective media experiences, reinforce audiences’ preexisting preferences, and the cumulative risk to PSM of becoming more like a gold￿sh bowl, rather than a window to the world [1, 17, 19, 23, 25]. However, counter to this is the view that recommender systems could be im- portant in promoting diversity of supply and stimulating exposure diversity [8, 9]. The European Broadcast Union (EBU) describes due oversight and scrutiny [26] to ensure they do not undermine editorial independence, impartiality [7] and their trusted reputa- tion. They must deliver recommendations that responsibly balance personalisation with the public interest. 3 PSM VALUES AS A FRAMEWORK FOR RECOMMENDER SYSTEMS The notion that PSM values o￿er distinct frameworks for recom- mender systems is underpinning new EBU initiatives to develop distinctly PSM approaches to recommendations1. As a public ser- vice broadcaster, the BBC’s aims and operating principles are en- shrined in our public purposes2 which commit us to impartiality, distinctiveness, and diversity in our output. Issues of Fairness, Ac- countability and Transparency (FAT) thus inform approaches to recommendation and personalisation as these values are baked into its very reasons for existing as an organisation - in a way that is not necessarily true of commercial organisations. John Reith’s famous imperative of the BBC to "inform, educate and entertain" lies at the heart of the BBC mission. Whilst this has evolved over the years, the BBC’s unique duty and role in society remains central. In the domain of recommender systems the Reithian view of PSM commits to providing content which ful￿ls the public’s need for diverse and balanced information, entertainment, and education in a manner which is unexpected or surprising – best expressed by Reith’s assertion that "the best way to give the public what it wants is to reject the express policy of giving the public what it wants"3. Notions of public service inevitably vary across di￿erent geo-political and cultural contexts [8] and a one size ￿ts all model is likely to be unsatisfactory but it is clear that the PSM remit has implications for how we design and evaluate recommenders to ensure principles such as exposure diversity and surprise are maintained. 4 PUBLIC SERVICE ALGORITHMIC DESIGN: WHAT YOU OPTIMISE FOR MATTERS Why is this signi￿cant for recommender systems speci￿cally? The metrics we choose to optimise for are critical. Many commercial providers optimise for engagement and audience ￿gures, for ex- ample collaborative ￿ltering (CF) algorithms are often evaluated in terms of how accurately they predict user ratings. If PSM or- Human-centric evaluation of similarity spaces of news articles Clara Higuera Caba˜ nes Michel Schammel Shirley Ka Kei Yu Ben Fields [first name].[last name]@bbc.co.uk The British Broadcasting Corporation New Broadcasting House, Portland Place London, W1A 1AA United Kingdom Abstract In this paper we present a practical approach to evaluate similarity spaces of news articles, guided by human perception. This is moti- vated by applications that are expected by modern news audiences, most notably recom- mender systems. Our approach is laid out and contextualised with a brief background in human similarity measurement and percep- tion. This is complimented with a discussion of computational methods for measuring sim- ilarity between news articles. We then go through a prototypical use of the evaluation in a practical setting before we point to fu- ture work enabled by this framework. 1 Introduction and Motivation In a modern news organisation, there are a number of functions that depend on computational understand- ing of produced media. For text-based news articles this typically takes the form of lower dimensionality content-similarity. But how do we know that these similarities are reliable? On what basis can we take these computational similarity spaces to be a proxy for human judgement? In this paper we address this • Analogously, what are e cient and e↵ective means of computing similarity between news ar- ticles • By what means can we use the human cognition of article similarity to select parameters or otherwise tune a computed similarity space A typical application that benefits from this sort of human calibrated similarity space for news articles is an article recommender system. While a classic col- laborative filtering approach has been tried within the news domain [LDP10], typical user behaviour makes this approach di cult in practice. In particular, the lifespan of individual articles tends to be short and the item preferences of users is light. This leads to a situation where in practice a col- laborative filtering approach is hampered by the cold- start problem, where lack of preference data negatively impacts the predictive power of the system. To get around this issue, a variety of more domain-specific ap- proaches have been tried [GDF13, TASJ14, KKGV18]. However, these all demand significant levels of analyt- ical e↵ort or otherwise present challenges when scaling to a large global news organisation. A simple way to get around these constraints while still meeting the functional requirements1 of a recommender system is to generate a similarity space across recently published https://piret.gitlab.io/fatrec2018/program/fatrec2018-fields.pdf https://research.signal-ai.com/newsir19/programme/index.html
  2. Motivations and Aims Data to deliver personalised services has become

    a key strategic priority for Public Service Media organisations across Europe Ethics, Data Science, and Public Service Media | EGG London | 2 July 2019
  3. potential to undermine shared and collective media experiences Ethics, Data

    Science, and Public Service Media | EGG London | 2 July 2019 Motivations and Aims https://www.flickr.com/photos/woolamaloo_gazette/47571470732/
  4. reinforce audiences’ preexisting preferences Ethics, Data Science, and Public Service

    Media | EGG London | 2 July 2019 Motivations and Aims https://www.flickr.com/photos/garryknight/4659576761
  5. Motivations and Aims Ethics, Data Science, and Public Service Media

    | EGG London | 2 July 2019 (Public Service) Media becoming more like a goldfish bowl, rather than a window to the world https://www.flickr.com/photos/60852569@N00/3321751008/
  6. Motivations and Aims For traditional commercial applications the goal is

    a straightforward extension of an organisation’s overall commercial aims https://www.flickr.com/photos/24354425@N03/16593266327 Ethics, Data Science, and Public Service Media | EGG London | 2 July 2019
  7. Thus far guidance on how public service (media) should approach

    personalisation has been vague and not sufficient to drive implementation Ethics, Data Science, and Public Service Media | EGG London | 2 July 2019
  8. How can public service values lead to novel ways to

    design recommender algorithms? Ethics, Data Science, and Public Service Media | EGG London | 2 July 2019
  9. How do we operationalise public service media (PSM) values as

    tangible concepts in specific contexts? Ethics, Data Science, and Public Service Media | EGG London | 2 July 2019
  10. operationalise PSM Caveat: Notions of public service inevitably vary across

    different geo-political and cultural contexts (Helberger 2015) Ethics, Data Science, and Public Service Media | EGG London | 2 July 2019
  11. operationalise PSM Key challenges: operationalising concepts like diversity, surprise, shared

    experience, etc. Ethics, Data Science, and Public Service Media | EGG London | 2 July 2019
  12. operationalise PSM “any initiative to promote diversity exposure will first

    have to deal with ‘the question of what exposure diversity actually is’ as well as how to measure it” (Helberger et al. 2018) Ethics, Data Science, and Public Service Media | EGG London | 2 July 2019
  13. How much accuracy loss is acceptable in pursuit of new

    metrics, e.g. diversity? Ethics, Data Science, and Public Service Media | EGG London | 2 July 2019
  14. At what (accuracy) cost? Tradeoffs must be made explicitly to

    minimise unexpected and undesirable outcomes Ethics, Data Science, and Public Service Media | EGG London | 2 July 2019
  15. At what (accuracy) cost? Can this question be answered through

    other research practises? (e.g. audience research, UX methodologies)? Ethics, Data Science, and Public Service Media | EGG London | 2 July 2019 https://www.flickr.com/photos/usc_annenberg_innovation_lab/8675548605
  16. How should transparency work - when and to whom is

    it useful, e.g. regulators? Ethics, Data Science, and Public Service Media | EGG London | 2 July 2019
  17. Transparency for whom? Principles of transparency key to the mission

    of PSM: They provide the mechanism by which PSM are regulated and held accountable The Case for Public Service Recommender Algorithms | EBU AI Workshop | 9 November 2018
  18. Transparency for whom? • Transparency for stakeholders/audiences or regulators? •

    When we say transparency, when do we mean disclosure? • In a user-facing system this is an issue of enabling consent to be meaningful • However in a stakeholder arrangement this is about disclosure The Case for Public Service Recommender Algorithms | EBU AI Workshop | 9 November 2018
  19. How do we design for interpretability and explainability to enable

    appropriate oversight of how recommenders are making decisions and ensure due accountability? Ethics, Data Science, and Public Service Media | EGG London | 2 July 2019
  20. Design for accountability? • Accountability vital to PSM/BBC • Transparency/full

    disclosure vs meaningful explanations for a user • Does the desire for transparency push algorithmic design in particular directions? Ethics, Data Science, and Public Service Media | EGG London | 2 July 2019
  21. Design for accountability? • How can complex algorithmic systems designed

    to be intelligible/interpretable • What types of explanations can a system generate/what’s possible? • What explanations will be sufficient for oversight? • How will explanation needs vary e.g regulators/ stakeholders/editorial/public? Ethics, Data Science, and Public Service Media | EGG London | 2 July 2019
  22. What type/level of explanation will be most useful? Ethics, Data

    Science, and Public Service Media | EGG London | 2 July 2019
  23. Will explanations produced for editorial need to vary from the

    type of explanations PSM may provide to audiences? Ethics, Data Science, and Public Service Media | EGG London | 2 July 2019
  24. Explanation, how much? For whom? • Are we explaining algorithmic

    decision making to users or to experts (principally: editorial teams)? • What is the distance between these two groups? Ethics, Data Science, and Public Service Media | EGG London | 2 July 2019
  25. better align recommender systems in public service contexts with their

    underlying value frameworks Ethics, Data Science, and Public Service Media | EGG London | 2 July 2019
  26. Thanks! Let’s have some questions! We’re hiring: http://bit.ly/bbcDSjobs Ben Fields

    @alsothings ben.fi[email protected] http://bit.ly/psmegg19 Question by fahmionline from the Noun Project https://thenounproject.com/fahmionline/collection/ask/ Ethics, Data Science, and Public Service Media | EGG London | 2 July 2019