The Media Change & Innovation Division will start a new research project on “Algorithmic selection in the Internet”. The project has a duration of two years and is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

This project grasps and assesses an Internet phenomenon that is developing into one of the central innovations of current media change: algorithmic selection, a distinctive feature of various societal communications processes.

Algorithmic selection of information constitutes the common technological and functional core of various Internet services and is growing rapidly in importance. It is the underlying technological function of diverse applications such as news aggregators (Google News, Techmeme), search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo), recommender systems (Amazon book recommendations, LastFM), computational advertising (Google AdSense) and reputation systems (eBay feedback). These applications automatically assess the relevance of web documents, choose the most important news articles, recommend books, songs or movies, display personalised advertising and determine the reputation of companies and scholars.

For more details check the research project’s webpage.