Recommendation Algorithms as a Fantastic Opportunity for Good

Dans le cadre des Conférences de Montréal en éthique de l’intelligence artificielle, Lê Nguyên Hoang fera une présentation intitulée «Recommendation Algorithms as a Fantastic Opportunity for Good».

Like Facebook and Twitter newsfeeds, 70% of views on YouTube result from algorithmic recommendations. On social medias, most of what billions of individuals are exposed to on a daily basis is decided by today’s most sophisticated AI systems. This has been argued to lead to large-scale concerns, in terms of misinformation, polarization, outrage, narcissism, suicide and addiction, to name a few. In this talk, however, I will argue that recommendation algorithms can also be regarded as a promising opportunity to do a large amount of good, e.g., by promoting quality information, therapeutic contents and epistemic hygiene. Unfortunately, this opportunity will require solving major philosophical, social and technological challenges. I will discuss these challenges, as well as promising research directions to make recommendation algorithms robustly beneficial for humanity.

After obtaining an engineering degree from the École Polytechnique in Paris, Lê Nguyên Hoang received a PhD from Polytechnique Montreal, and then became a postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He then took the lead on e-learning and science communication projects at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He also runs the YouTube channel Science4All, which has nearly 200k subscribers. He authored the books « The equation of knowledge », « Le fabuleux chantier » (with El Mahdi El Mhamdi) and « Turing à la plage » (with Rachid Guerraoui).