CCRI: Planning: RecommendNews: Community Research Infrastructure for Online Field Experiments

This planning grant will develop a shared vision and the partnerships required for an innovative research infrastructure that includes not only a computer system but also a community of users, for the development of new forms of recommender system applied to online news. There are three key broader impacts for this planning grant, and the subsequent infrastructure based on the plan. First, news recommendation has clear societal importance. Organizing the research community to support work on diversity, transparency, credibility, and effective news recommendation is a benefit not only for research, but for society. Second, the planned infrastructure has the potential to benefit not only the core research communities targeted, but also other research communities across the nation and around the world, including those in journalism and mass communication. Third, the planning process will engage a diverse set of researchers, including many from areas traditionally underserved, to extend the impact of this work as far as possible.

The design, construction, and governance of this infrastructure has significant research challenges. In this case, the system is a news recommender application (plus the back-end to support it) and the users will be people who read news through the application. The infrastructure also includes experimental controls to allow researchers to run experiments by varying the recommendation algorithms and interfaces of the application and measuring results. Such infrastructure can reinvigorate research in recommender systems by enabling new applications, study designs, and success metrics. Central to this project is a series of outreach activities and planning meetings for the community. These range from a broad survey and a community forum for 100 researchers (held in conjunction with a conference) to smaller meetings of intended users and partners in implementation. These meetings will identify community needs and priorities, design both the infrastructure itself and the governance models needed to operate it, and develop models to ensure sustainability. This planning effort will engage a diverse subset of the research community in deep and thoughtful discussions about what research we are unable to carry out in academic settings today, what research we value, and what infrastructure we need to advance research in the field.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.