Data Skeptic

There were reports of Russia’s interference in the 2016 US elections. In today’s episode, Koustuv Saha, a researcher at Microsoft Research walks us through the effect of targeted ads for political campaigns. Using practical examples, he discusses how targeted ads can propagate fake news, its ripple effects on electioneering, and how to find a sweet spot with targeted ads.

There is an unsung kind of ad fraud brewing in the ad tech space — placement laundering fraud. On the show, Jeff Kline discusses what placement laundering fraud is, how it can be identified, and possible solutions to it. Listen to learn more.

Bosko Milekic, the Co-founder of Optable, a data collaboration platform for the media and advertising industry, joins us today. Bosko talked about the clean rooms, the technology driving data privacy during collaboration. He discussed why clean rooms are gaining widespread adoption, and how users can exploit Optable’s clean room platform for a secured data-sharing experience.

Kerstin Bongard-Blanchy is a Research Associate at the University of Luxembourg. She joins us to discuss her study that investigated dark patterns in web designs. She discussed the results, the effect of dark patterns effect on users, whether an average user can detect them, and the way forward to a more ethical web space.

We are joined by Anthony Katsur, the CEO of IAB Tech Lab. Anthony discusses standards within the ad tech industry. He explained how IAB Tech Lab set and propagates global standards, actions to ensure compliance from advertisers, and industry trends for a more privacy-centric ad tech space.

When we navigate a webpage, it is fairly easy for our mouse movement to be tracked and collected. Today, Luis Leiva, a Professor of Computer Science discusses how these mouse tracking data can be used to predict age, gender and user attention. He also discusses the privacy concerns with mouse tracking data and possible ways it can be curtailed.

On the show, Aleksandra Urman and Mykola Makhortykh join us to discuss their work on the comparative analysis of web search behavior using web tracking data. They shared interesting results from their analysis, bordering around the user preferences for search engines, demographic patterns, and differences between how men and women surf the net.

Did Aristotle Use a Laptop?  That's a question from the StrategyQA benchmark which highlights the stretch goals for current artificial intelligence systems.  Answering a question like that requires several cognitive steps and reasoning.  Constructing a dataset of similarly challenging questions is a major undertaking.  On today's episode, Mor Geva returns to share details about the creation of StrategyQA and the larger Big Bench dataset it has been included in.

While at first glance, the use of ad blockers drops the revenue of news publishers, this may not be completely true. On the show today, Shunyao Yan, an Assistant Professor in Marketing at Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University, discussed the effect of ad blockers on news consumption and how ad blockers can potentially be helpful for news publishers.

People who do not want their data tracked and shared online can pay a token for a cookie paywall. But are the websites keeping to their side of the bargain? Victor Morel, a Postdoc candidate at the Chalmers University of Technology joins us to discuss his work around auditing the activities of cookie paywalls. He discussed the findings from his analysis and proffers some solutions to making cookie paywalls more transparent.