Abstract: By accounting for individual preferences and differences between people, personalized news recommender systems can help readers find the news stories that are in some way relevant to them. In doing so, they are taking over the gatekeeping role traditionally held by human editors, and are thus in part shaping which news gets the public’s attention. Yet in their current form, news recommender systems primarily optimize for clicks, and do not or hardly account for the values that humans would adhere to when constructing an overview of the news.
For news recommender systems to reach their full potential, we need to translate abstract journalistic and editorial values, which are often ‘gut feelings’, into measurable technological artifacts. In this talk we will discuss the challenges of doing so, the work that has been done thus far, and look forward to the inter- and transdisciplinary issues that need to be resolved.
About the speaker: Sanne Vrijenhoek is a tenure track researcher at the Centrum Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI) in the Netherlands. She is also affiliated with the AI, Media and Democracy Lab, and the University of Amsterdam’s Institute for Information Law, where she obtained her PhD. Her work explores how news recommender systems can inform readers, rather than merely optimizing their clicks. Drawing on expertise in artificial intelligence, information law, journalism, and communication science, she develops ways to translate normative notions of diversity into tangible technical solutions.
About the moderator: Lynda Hardman is Principal Researcher & Strategist at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), Amsterdam, and Professor of Multimedia Discourse Interaction at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She chairs the SURF Scientific Technical Council, the national association that provides Dutch educational and research institutions with state of the art data, network and compute facilities. She has served on the European COST Scientific Committee since 2021 and was appointed Chair in 2025. She is a member of the Scientific Directorate of Schloss Dagstuhl and the Scientific Advisory Board of the Mannheim Center for Data Science. She is involved in promoting equality, diversity and inclusion in the Dutch academic community through the ICT-Research Platform Netherlands. Hardman is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and an ACM Distinguished Scientist.