UMAP 2026 Doctoral Consortium Paper Accepted

PhD student Valdy Wiratama’s doctoral consortium paper was recently accepted at the 34th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP 2026). The accepted paper is titled “Towards a Stakeholder-Centered Auditing Framework for Assessing Fairness in (Music) Recommender Systems.”

In the paper, Valdy outlines the background of his doctoral research project, which begins with the challenge of assessing fairness in recommender systems. He argues that existing approaches often rely on technical proxies and static metrics that do not sufficiently reflect how fairness is understood by different affected stakeholders. In response to this gap, the paper proposes an auditing framework that formalizes perspectives on fairness across multiple stakeholders.

Using the music domain as its use case, the paper focuses on a setting in which artists and other item providers, listeners, and music streaming services may have conflicting goals and fairness expectations. To capture this and address the research question, the paper outlines a three-stage mixed-methods approach, which consists of data collection through literature review and interviews, framework development through qualitative and quantitative synthesis, and evaluation through stakeholder-centered scenario-based assessments.

Overall, the work aims to contribute a more structured and context-sensitive approach to auditing fairness in recommender systems by making stakeholder values and trade-offs more explicit in the assessment process. It will also be presented as part of the Doctoral Consortium at UMAP 2026 in Gothenburg, Sweden, on Monday, June 8, 2026.