Workshop Day: October 2, 2026 - Room Ballroom 4, Minneapolis (Marriott CC)
Invited Talks
- When: October 2nd, h. 09:15
- Speaker: Sole Pera, Technische University of Delf (TU Delft)
- Title: For Good? Children, Recommenders, and the Questions We Are Still Not Asking
- Abstract: Recommender systems shape children's digital landscape: what they encounter, who they connect with, how they become informed, and, in turn, how they see the world. Yet recommenders are rarely designed with young users in mind or evaluated against what is fitting for them. During this keynote, I examine what RecSys for Good means when the "user" is a child, focusing on the gap between how recommenders are designed vs. how they are experienced. The tensions are not only technical; they reflect broader societal questions (around privacy, personalization, agency, protection, and context) which every recommendation ends up answering, whether by intention or by default. Policy is catching up (e.g., the EU Digital Services Act), but translating principles into code remains a challenge. Drawing on insights from research and real-world deployments, I discuss where current approaches fall short, where standard assumptions no longer hold, and where LLMs may complicate the picture further. Along the way, I outline pathways toward recommenders shaped with children, not merely for them — confronting the questions we are still not asking and how we can change for good.
- When: October 2nd, h. 13:30
- Speaker: Erasmo Purficato, Joint Research Centre, European Commission
- Title: Unpacking Fairness in Recommendations: Statistical Guarantees, User Control, and Collective Resistance
- Abstract: As recommender systems shape modern information ecosystems, aligning them with sustainability and social responsibility requires moving beyond heuristic controls toward provable safeguards. While platforms increasingly rely on explicit user feedback to mitigate harmful or unwanted recommendations, creating systems that are simultaneously fair, safe, and resilient against manipulation remains a open challenge. In this keynote, we explore the frontiers of responsible recommendation through the lens of conformal risk control, a framework offering statistical, distribution-free safety guarantees for user feeds. We examine how rigorous risk bounds can empower individual user control while preserving overall recommendation utility. Building on these foundational principles, we then dive into the broader social and adversarial dynamics surrounding safety mechanisms. We discuss how coordinated collective action can unintentionally or strategically exploit global safety thresholds to degrade system fairness, and how personalizing risk guarantees can restore systemic resilience. Finally, we outline key open directions for building sustainable recommendation ecosystems that effectively balance individual agency, algorithmic fairness, and policy requirements.
Program:
08:45 – 09:00 — Setting and Welcome - WS Organizers
09:00 – 09:15 - Opening - WS Organizers
09:15 – 10:00 - Invited Talk I: Sole Pera - chair: Allegra De Filippo
10:00 – 10:30 - Coffee Break and Networking
10:30 – 11:30 - Session I: RecSys and Social Sustainability - chair: Ludovico Boratto
- - "VTracker 2.0: AI-Powered Tool for Detecting Recommendation Traps and Quantifying Algorithmic Bias" – Nitin Agarwal, Femi Alayesanmi and Dinesh Ramadugu
- - "Assessing Biases in Multimodal Recommender Systems: Analyzing the Accuracy-Fairness Trade-off for Social Sustainability" – Giuseppe Spillo, Allegra De Filippo, Cataldo Musto, Michela Milano and Giovanni Semeraro
- - "Fairness-Aware Data Minimization in Recommender Systems via Balanced Active Learning" – Sipei Li, Nasim Sonboli, Mehdi Elahi and Alva Couch
- - "Fair Exposure as a Democratic-Design Goal: Feed Ranking for Participatory Budgeting" – Carina Hausladen
11:30 – 12:00 - Session II: RecSys for Social Good - chair: Allegra De Filippo
- - "What Would It Take for Point-of-interest Recommender Systems to Support SDG 11?" – Ludovico Boratto and Adir Solomon
- - "Building Good Together, Step by Step: Co-Participatory Design for Information Access" – Damiano Spina, Maria Soledad Pera and Monica Landoni
12:00 – 13:30 - Lunch and Networking
13:30 – 14:15 - Invited Talk II: Erasmo Purificato - chair: Ludovico Boratto
14:15 – 14:55 - Session III: RecSys and Environmental Sustainability - chair: Giuseppe Spillo
- - "From Energy-Efficient to Energy-Aware Recommender Systems" – Alan Said
- - "Energy Footprint of Data Reduction Strategies for Recommender Systems" – Marcell Herbák, Oleg Lesota and Antonela Tommasel
- - "Graph Recommender System for Biological Control Agents Against Plant Pathogens" – Gonçalo Loureiro, Ricardo S. Ramiro, Manisha Sanjay Sirsat, Muhammad Asadullah, Leonor Fandinga, Soraia M. Alarcão, Vânia Mendonça and Márcia Barros
14:55 – 15:00 - Closing - WS Organizers
15:00 – 15:30 - Coffee Break and Networking
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