Publications

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Conference Papers

A Longitudinal Study of Extended User IDs in the Online Advertising Ecosystem

Published in 2026 ACM Internet Measurement Conference, 2026

This paper shows that the alternative tracking technology of extended identifiers has become substantially more popular in client-side header bidding auctions in recent years. Although initially proposed as an alternative to third-party cookies, the findings suggest that EIDs are being used to complement third-party cookies as their prevalence continued to rise after third-party cookie deprecation on Google was abandoned.

Recommended citation: Michael Smith, Riley Grossman, Krzysztof Franaszek, Antonio Torres-Agüero, Pritam Sen, Cristian Borcea, and Yi Chen. 2026. A Longitudinal Study of Extended User IDs in the Online Advertising Ecosystem. In Proceedings of the 2026 ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC ’26), October 12–16, 2026, Karlsruhe, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 10 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3777912.3839792
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How Generative AI Disrupts Search: An Empirical Study of Google Search, Gemini, and AI Overviews

Published in 2026 ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 2026

This paper shows that Google’s generative search engines significantly differ from Google Search in terms of the retrieved sources for a user query. It further explores what types of content see substantial changes in visibility due to generative search and considers the implications for publishers and users.

Recommended citation: Grossman, R., Liu, S., Chen, M., Smith, M., Borcea, C., & Chen, Y. (2026). How Generative AI Disrupts Search: An Empirical Study of Google Search, Gemini, and AI Overviews. Forthcoming in the ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval.
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Multilingual Disparities in LLM-Based Safety Judgments: Evidence from Brand Safety Applications

Published in The 1st Workshop on Multilinguality in the Era of Large Language Models, 2026

We evaluate LLM brand-safety ratings on aligned multilingual news and find systematic language-conditioned disparities across 10,467 Euronews articles and 13 languages.

Recommended citation: Songjiang Liu, Riley Grossman, Mike Smith, Cristian Borcea, Yi Chen (2026). Multilingual Disparities in LLM-Based Safety Judgments: Evidence from Brand Safety Applications. Forthcoming in the The 1st Workshop on Multilinguality in the Era of Large Language Models (MeLLM 2026).
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Zero-shot Large Language Models for Automatic Readability Assessment

Published in The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2026

This paper proposes LAURAE for the automatic readability assessment task, an ensemble method combining combining LLM and readability formula scores, where ensemble weights are determined from the LLM’s verbalized confidence scores.

Recommended citation: Grossman, R. & Chen, Y. (2026). Zero-shot Large Language Models for Automatic Readability Assessment. Forthcoming in the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026).
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Inconsistencies in Classification of Online News Articles: A Call for Common Standards in Brand Safety Services.

Published in Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 2026

This paper documents the high-level of inconsistency in brand safety ratings from three main providers and discusses the implications for publishers and advertisers.

Recommended citation: Smith, M., Grossman, R., Torres-Agüero, A., Sen, P., Chen, Y., & Borcea, C. (2026). Inconsistencies in Classification of Online News Articles: A Call for Common Standards in Brand Safety Services. Forthcoming in Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM).
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Using Salient Object Detection to Identify Manipulative Cookie Banners that Circumvent GDPR

Published in Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 2026

This paper proposes the application of an unsupervised salient object detection model for detecting aesthetic manipulation in cookie banners. The results include showing that aesthetic manipulation is more prevalent than previously thought, and deserves considerable attention in future privacy regulations.

Recommended citation: Grossman, R., Smith, M., Borcea, C., & Chen, Y. (2026). Using Salient Object Detection to Identify Manipulative Cookie Banners that Circumvent GDPR. Forthcoming in Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM).
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Explaining Clinical Outcome Predictions with Compositional Rationale Extraction Model

Published in 2025 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData), 2025

This paper develops a composition-level rationale extraction model for explainable readmission prediction in a clinical setting.

Recommended citation: Gao, W., Grossman, R. & Chen, Y. (2025). Explaining Clinical Outcome Prediction with Compositional Rationale Extraction Model. In 2025 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData).
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A study of gdpr compliance under the transparency and consent framework

Published in Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2024, 2024

This paper evaluates whether the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Transparency and Consent Frmaework truly protects user privacy on the Web and ensures publisher compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation.

Recommended citation: Smith, M., Torres-Agüero, A., Grossman, R., Sen, P., Chen, Y., & Borcea, C. (2024). A Study of GDPR Compliance under the Transparency and Consent Framework. In Proceedings of the ACM on Web Conference 2024 (pp. 1227-1236).
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Journal Articles

Knot mosaics with corner connection tiles

Published in Pi Mu Epsilon Journal, 2023

This paper explores the efficiency of representing knot mosaics using new tiles where the connection points are in the corners, rather than midpoints of each edge.

Recommended citation: Heap, A., Donovan, U., Grossman, R., Laine, N., McDermott, C., Paone, M., & Southcott, D. (2023). Knot Mosaics with Corner Connection Tiles. Pi Mu Epsilon Journal 15, No. 9, 553-568.
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