Announcing Best Paper Awards

The Best Paper Award Committee was chaired this year by Suresh Venkatasubramanian and included eight Area Chairs: William Agnew, Sebastian Benthall, Toon Calders, Shion Guha, Kate Kaye, Samir Passi, and Hilde Weerts. Committee members were assigned nominated papers to review and score, following checks for conflict of interest.

The committee selected three papers for the Best Paper Award and recognized five additional papers with Honorable Mentions out of the 325 accepted papers.

We are grateful to Suresh and the other committee members for their thoughtful and careful deliberation.

Best Paper Awards

The DSA’s Blind Spot: Algorithmic Audit of Advertising and Minor Profiling on TikTok
Sara Solarova, Matej Mosnar, Matus Tibensky, Jan Jakubcik, Adrian Bindas, Simon Liska, Filip Hossner, Matúš Mesarčík, Ivan Srba

The committee awarded the Best Paper Award to this work for conducting an algorithmic audit of TikTok’s compliance with Article 28(2) of the EU’s Digital Services Act, showing that despite formal compliance, the regulation’s narrow definition of “advertisement” still results in significant exposure of minors to personally targeted advertisements through undisclosed commercial content.

A pipeline for enabling path-specific causal fairness in observational health data
Aparajita Kashyap, Sara Matijevic, Noémie Elhadad, Steven A. Kushner, Shalmali Joshi

The committee awarded the Best Paper Award to this work for demonstrating how a causally fair medical prediction pipeline can be built using a foundation model trained without fairness constraints, and for disentangling direct and indirect sources of bias and their implications for the “fairness-accuracy” tradeoff.

Beyond Explanation: Evidentiary Rights for Algorithmic Accountability
Matthew Stewart

The committee awarded the Best Paper Award to this work for systematic analysis of evidentiary access and accountability success as well as a taxonomy of contestation failures in 168 litigated cases spanning international jurisdictions and several algorithmic decision-making domains.

Best Paper Honorable Mentions

Putting the `Practice’ in Critical Technical Practice: A Decision-Making Pedagogy for the Public Interest Technology Clinic
Lauren M. Chambers, Diag Davenport

The committee awarded an Honorable Mention to this work for developing a decision-centered account of public interest technology clinics, showing how client-facing, consequential projects can help students move from performing sociotechnical critique to enacting accountable practice under uncertainty.

Ambiguity Collapse by LLMs: A Taxonomy of Epistemic Risks
Shira Gur-Arieh, Angelina Wang, Sina Fazelpour

The committee awarded an Honorable Mention to this work for its careful identification and taxonomization of an important set of epistemic risks associated with LLMs, coupled with illustrative use cases and constructive strategies for mitigating these risks.

Making a Name for Myself: On Academic Naming Policies and their Impact
A Pranav, Vagrant Gautam, Martin Mundt, Jordan Taylor, Arjun Subramonian, Franziska Sofia Hafner, Daniel Chechelnitsky, William Agnew, Anne Lauscher

The committee awarded an Honorable Mention to this work for its careful mixed-methods approach to evaluate impact and effectiveness of name change policies, its showcasing of the value of inclusive policies, and its recommendations for publishing venues.

Do User-Aligned Explanations Steer Human Decisions? Context-Dependent Influence and Ethical Implications
Mingzhe Yang, Rina Kagawa, Yukino Baba

The committee awarded an Honorable Mention to this work for its thought-provoking insights into how user-alignment of LLM explanations can be manipulative, leading users to make decisions they would not have made ordinarily.

A Dual Role Collision: How Generative AI’s Intertwining Productivity Support and Social Support Reshape Indie Game Developers’ Creative Work
Ruchi Panchanadikar, Yang Hu, Guo Freeman

The committee awarded an Honorable Mention to this work for rigorous study of how generative AI is impacting a creative community and a novel theory of how dual, entangled technical support and emotional support roles can erode community support.