WeNet presented at the 30th The Web Conference 2021

On April 19, WeNet’s Project Coordinator, Prof. Fausto Giunchiglia (University of Trento), held a keynote presentation on “Diversity, Bias, online social relations and related issues” during the 30^th edition of The Web Conference – a prestigious and long-established international conference on the topic of the World Wide Web.

Through concrete examples, Prof. Giunchiglia’s presentation focused on how deeply the Web is changing and affecting social interactions: a current hot topic and issue, at the core of WeNet’s work.

In the keynote, Prof. Giunchiglia stated that although users are now able to instantly access a seemingly infinite amount of information and diversity through the internet, the concurrent limits on prolonged interactions are amplifying the negative effects of diversity, as demonstrated by the rise of fake news, bias and unethical behaviour. A connected problem lies also in the way design of systems for users is approached – the difficulties in analysing, reconsidering, and rebuilding personal frames of references, among others.

The last part of the keynote explored the concept of “essential diversity” – one of the main focus areas of WeNet – offering an overview on the results of the project (with reference to recent research and publications) in its work to analyse and empower new perspectives and types of online social interaction.

To learn more, the presentation can be found in the dedicated section of this website, and a full recording of the keynote is available here below: