Recsperts - Recommender Systems Experts: Recent Episodes
Marcel Kurovski
Recommender Systems are the most challenging, powerful and ubiquitous area of machine learning and artificial intelligence. This podcast hosts the experts in recommender systems research and application. From understanding what users really want to driving large-scale content discovery - from delivering personalized online experiences to catering to multi-stakeholder goals. Guests from industry and academia share how they tackle these and many more challenges. With Recsperts coming from universities all around the globe or from various industries like streaming, ecommerce, news, or social media, this podcast provides depth and insights. We go far beyond your 101 on RecSys and the shallowness of another matrix factorization based rating prediction blogpost! The motto is: be relevant or become irrelevant! Expect a brand-new interview each month and follow Recsperts on your favorite podcast player.
In episode 18 of Recsperts, we hear from Professor Sole Pera from Delft University of Technology. We discuss the use of recommender systems for non-traditional populations, with children in particular. Sole shares the specifics, surprises, and subtleties of her research on recommendations for children.
In our interview, Sole and I discuss use cases and domains which need particular attention with respect to non-traditional populations. Sole outlines some of the major challenges like lacking public datasets or multifaceted criteria for the suitability of recommendations. The highly dynamic needs and abilities of children pose proper user modeling as a crucial part in the design and development of recommender systems. We also touch on how children interact differently with recommender systems and learn that trust plays a major role here.
Towards the end of the episode, we revisit the different goals and stakeholders involved in recommendations for children, especially the role of parents. We close with an overview of the current research community.
Enjoy this enriching episode of RECSPERTS - Recommender Systems Experts.
Don't forget to follow the podcast and please leave a review
- (00:00) - Introduction
- (04:56) - About Sole Pera
- (06:37) - Non-traditional Populations
- (09:13) - Dedicated User Modeling
- (25:01) - Main Application Domains
- (40:16) - Lack of Data about non-traditional Populations
- (47:53) - Data for Learning User Profiles
- (57:09) - Interaction between Children and Recommendations
- (01:00:26) - Goals and Stakeholders
- (01:11:35) - Role of Parents and Trust
- (01:17:59) - Evaluation
- (01:26:59) - Research Community
- (01:32:37) - Closing Remarks
Links from the Episode:* Sole Pera on LinkedIn * Sole's Website * Children and Recommenders * KidRec 2022 * People and Information Retrieval Team (PIReT)
Papers:
- Beyhan et al. (2023): Covering Covers: Characterization Of Visual Elements Regarding Sleeves
- Murgia et al. (2019): The Seven Layers of Complexity of Recommender Systems for Children in Educational Contexts
- Pera et al. (2019): With a Little Help from My Friends: User of Recommendations at School
- Charisi et al. (2022): Artificial Intelligence and the Rights of the Child: Towards an Integrated Agenda for Research and Policy
- Gómez et al. (2021): Evaluating recommender systems with and for children: towards a multi-perspective framework
- Ng et al. (2018): Recommending social-interactive games for adults with autism spectrum disorders (ASD)
General Links:
- Follow me on LinkedIn
- Follow me on Twitter
- Send me your comments, questions and suggestions to marcel@recsperts.com
- Recsperts Website
In episode 17 of Recsperts, we meet Miguel Fierro who is a Principal Data Science Manager at Microsoft and holds a PhD in robotics. We talk about the Microsoft recommenders repository with over 15k stars on GitHub and discuss the impact of LLMs on RecSys. Miguel also shares his view of the T-shaped data scientist.
In our interview, Miguel shares how he transitioned from robotics into personalization as well as how the Microsoft recommenders repository started. We learn more about the three key components: examples, library, and tests. With more than 900 tests and more than 30 different algorithms, this library demonstrates a huge effort of open-source contribution and maintenance. We hear more about the principles that made this effort possible and successful. Therefore, Miguels also shares the reasoning behind evidence-based design to put the users of microsoft-recommenders and their expectations first. We also discuss the impact that recent LLM-related innovations have on RecSys.
At the end of the episode, Miguel explains the T-shaped data professional as an advice to stay competitive and build a champion data team. We conclude with some remarks regarding the adoption and ethical challenges recommender systems pose and which need further attention.
Enjoy this enriching episode of RECSPERTS - Recommender Systems Experts.
Don't forget to follow the podcast and please leave a review
- (00:00) - Episode Overview
- (03:34) - Introduction Miguel Fierro
- (16:19) - Microsoft Recommenders Repository
- (30:04) - Structure of MS Recommenders
- (34:16) - Contributors to MS Recommenders
- (37:10) - Scalability of MS Recommenders
- (39:32) - Impact of LLMs on RecSys
- (48:26) - T-shaped Data Professionals
- (53:29) - Further RecSys Challenges
- (59:28) - Closing Remarks
Links from the Episode:* Miguel Fierro on LinkedIn * Miguel Fierro on Twitter * Miguel's Website * Microsoft Recommenders * McKinsey (2013): How retailers can keep up with consumers * Fortune (2012): Amazon's recommendation secret * RecSys 2021 Keynote by Max Welling: Graph Neural Networks for Knowledge Representation and Recommendation
Papers:
- Geng et al. (2022): Recommendation as Language Processing (RLP): A Unified Pretrain, Personalized Prompt & Predict Paradigm (P5)
General Links:
- Follow me on LinkedIn
- Follow me on Twitter
- Send me your comments, questions and suggestions to marcel@recsperts.com
- Recsperts Website
In episode number ten of Recsperts I welcome David Graus who is the Data Science Chapter Lead at Randstad Groep Nederland, a global leader in providing Human Resource services. We talk about the role of recommender systems in the HR domain which includes vacancy recommendations for candidates, but also generating talent recommendations for recruiters at Randstad. We also learn which biases might have an influence when using recommenders for decision support in the recruiting process as well as how Randstad mitigates them.
In this episode we learn more about another domain where recommender systems can serve humans by effective decision support: Human Resources. Here, everything is about job recommendations, matching candidates with vacancies, but also exploiting knowledge about career path to propose learning opportunities and assist with career development. David Graus leads those efforts at Randstad and has previously worked in the news recommendation domain after obtaining his PhD from the University of Amsterdam.
We discuss the most recent contribution by Randstad on mitigating bias in candidate recommender systems by introducing fairness-oriented post- and preprocessing to a recommendation pipeline. We learn that one can maintain user satisfaction while improving fairness at the same time (demographic parity measuring gender balance in this case).
David and I also touch on his engagement in co-organizing the RecSys in HR workshops since RecSys 2021.
Enjoy this enriching episode of RECSPERTS - Recommender Systems Experts.
Links from the Episode:
- David Graus on LinkedIn
- David Graus on Twitter
- David's Website
- RecSys in HR 2022: Workshop on Recommender Systems for Human Recources
- Randstad Annual Report 2021
- Talk by David Graus at Anti-Discrimination Hackaton on "Algorithmic matching, bias, and bias mitigation"
- [additional]
Papers:
- Arafan et al. (2022): End-to-End Bias Mitigation in Candidate Recommender Systems with Fairness Gates
- Geyik et al. (2019): Fairness-Aware Ranking in Search & Recommendation Systems with Application to LinkedIn Talent Search
- [additional]
General Links:
- Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LivesInAnalogia
- Send me your comments, questions and suggestions to marcel@recsperts.com
- Podcast Website: https://www.recsperts.com/
In episode number nine of Recsperts we talk with the creators of RecPack which is a new Python package for recommender systems. We discuss how Froomle provides modularized personalization for customers in the news and e-commerce sectors. I talk to Lien Michiels and Robin Verachtert who are both industrial PhD students at the University of Antwerp and who work for Froomle. We also hear about their research on filter bubbles as well as model drift along with their RecSys 2022 contributions.
In this episode we introduce RecPack as a new recommender package that is easy to use and to extend and which allows for consistent experimentation. Lien and Robin share with us how RecPack evolved, its structure as well as the problems in research and practice they intend to solve with their open source contribution.
My guests also share many insights from their work at Froomle where they focus on modularized personalization with more than 60 recommendation scenarios and how they integrate these with their customers. We touch on topics like model drift and the need for frequent retraining as well as on the tradeoffs between accuracy, cost, and timeliness in production recommender systems.
In the end we also exchange about Lien's critical reception of using the term 'filter bubble', an operationalized definition of them as well as Robin's research on model degradation and training data selection.
Enjoy this enriching episode of RECSPERTS - Recommender Systems Experts.
Links from the Episode:
- Lien Michiels on LinkedIn
- Lien Michiels on Twitter
- Robin Verachtert on LinkedIn
- RecPack on GitLab
- RecPack Documentation
- FROOMLE
- PERSPECTIVES 2022: Perspectives on the Evaluation of Recommender Systems
- PERSPECTIVES 2022: Preview on "Towards a Broader Perspective in Recommender Evaluation" by Benedikt Loepp
- 5th FAccTRec Workshop: Responsible Recommendation
Papers:
- Verachtert et al. (2022): Are We Forgetting Something? Correctly Evaluate a Recommender System With an Optimal Training Window
- Leysen and Michiels et al. (2022): What Are Filter Bubbles Really? A Review of the Conceptual and Empirical Work
- Michiels and Verachtert et al. (2022): RecPack: An(other) Experimentation Toolkit for Top-N Recommendation using Implicit Feedback Data
- Dahlgren (2021): A critical review of filter bubbles and a comparison with selective exposure
General Links:
- Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LivesInAnalogia
- Send me your comments, questions and suggestions to marcel@recsperts.com
- Podcast Website: https://www.recsperts.com/
In episode number eight of Recsperts we discuss music recommender systems, the meaning of artist fairness and perspectives on recommender evaluation. I talk to Christine Bauer, who is an assistant professor at the University of Utrecht and co-organizer of the PERSPECTIVES workshop. Her research deals with context-aware recommender systems as well as the role of fairness in the music domain. Christine published work at many conferences like CHI, CHIIR, ICIS, and WWW.
In this episode we talk about the specifics of recommenders in the music streaming domain. In particular, we discuss the interests of different stakeholders, like users, the platform, or artists. Christine Bauer presents insights from her research on fairness with respect to the representation of artists and their interests. We talk about gender imbalance and how recommender systems could serve as a tool to counteract existing imbalances instead of reinforcing them, for example with simulations and reranking. In addition, we talk about the lack of multi-method evaluation and how open datasets incline researchers to focus too much on offline evaluation. In contrast, Christine argues for more user studies and online evaluation.
We wrap up with some final remarks on context-aware recommender systems and the potential of sensor data for improving context-aware personalization.
Enjoy this enriching episode of RECSPERTS - Recommender Systems Experts.
Links from the Episode:
- Website of Christine Bauer
- Christine Bauer on LinkedIn
- Christine Bauer on Twitter
- PERSPECTIVES 2022: Perspectives on the Evaluation of Recommender Systems
- 5th FAccTRec Workshop: Responsible Recommendation
Papers:
- Ferraro et al. (2021): What is fair? Exploring the artists' perspective on the fairness of music streaming platforms
- Ferraro et. al (2021): Break the Loop: Gender Imbalance in Music Recommenders
- Jannach et al. (2020): Escaping the McNamara Fallacy: Towards More Impactful Recommender Systems Research
- Bauer et al. (2015): Designing a Music-controlled Running Application: a Sports Science and Psychological Perspective
- Dey et al. (2000): Towards a Better Understanding of Context and Context-Awareness
General Links:
- Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LivesInAnalogia
- Send me your comments, questions and suggestions to marcel@recsperts.com
- Podcast Website: https://www.recsperts.com/
In episode number seven, we meet Jacopo Tagliabue and discuss behavioral testing for recommender systems and experiences from ecommerce. Before Jacopo became the director of artificial intelligence at Coveo, he had founded tooso, which was later acquired by Coveo. Jacopo holds a PhD in cognitive intelligence and made many contributions to conferences like SIGIR, WWW, or RecSys. In addition, he serves as adjunct professor at NYU.
In this episode we introduce behavioral testing for recommender systems and the corresponding framework RecList that was created by Jacopo and his co-authors. Behavioral testing goes beyond pure retrieval accuracy metrics and tries to uncover unintended behavior of recommender models. RecList is an adaption of CheckList that applies behavioral testing to NLP and which was proposed by Microsoft some time ago. RecList comes with an open-source framework with ready set datasets for different recommender use-cases like similar, sequence-based and complementary item recommendations. Furthermore, it offers some sample tests to make it easier for newcomers to get started with behavioral testing. We also briefly touch on the upcoming CIKM data challenge that is going to focus on the evaluation of recommender systems.
In the end of this episode Jacopo also shares his insights from years of building and using diverse ML Ops tools and talk about what he refers to as the "post-modern stack".
Enjoy this enriching episode of RECSPERTS - Recommender Systems Experts.
Links from the Episode:
- Jacopo Tagliabue on LinkedIn
- GitHub: RecList
- CIKM RecEval Analyticup 2022 (sign up!)
- GitHub: You Don't Need a Bigger Boat - end-to-end (Metaflow-based) implementation of an intent prediction (and session recommendation) flow
- Coveo SIGIR eCOM 2021 Data Challenge Dataset
- Blogposts: The Post-Modern Stack - Joining the modern data stack with the modern ML stack
- TensorFlow Recommenders
- TorchRec
- NVIDIA Merlin
- Recommenders (by Microsoft)
- recbole
Papers:
- Chia et al. (2022): Beyond NDCG: behavioral testing of recommender systems with RecList
- Ribeiro et al. (2020): Beyond Accuracy: Behavioral Testing of NLP models with CheckList
- Bianchi et al. (2020): Fantastic Embeddings and How to Align Them: Zero-Shot Inference in a Multi-Shop Scenario
General Links:
- Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LivesInAnalogia
- Send me your comments, questions and suggestions to marcel@recsperts.com
- Podcast Website: https://www.recsperts.com/
In episode number six, we welcome Manel Slokom to the show and talk about purpose-aware privacy-preserving data for recommender systems. Manel is a 4th year PhD student at Delft University of Technology. For three years in a row she served as student volunteer at RecSys - before becoming student volunteer co-chair herself in 2021. Besides working on privacy and fairness, she also dedicates herself to simulation and in particular synthetic data for recommender systems - also co-organizing the 1st SimuRec Workshop as part of RecSys 2021.
This episode is definitely worth a longer run. Manel and I discussed fairness and privacy in recommender systems and how ratings can leak signals about sensitive personal information. For example, classifiers may exploit ratings in order to effectively determine one's gender. She explains "Personalized Blurring", which is the approach she developed to personalize gender obfuscation in user rating data, as well as how this can contribute to more diverse recommendations.
In our discussion, we also touch "data-centric AI", a term recently formulated by Andrew Ng, and how adapting feedback data may yield underestimated effects on recommendations that can lead to "data-centric recommender systems". In addition, we dived into the differences between simulated and synthetic data which brought us to the SimuRec workshop that she co-organized as part of RecSys 2021.
Finally, Manel provides some recommendations for young researcher to become active RecSys community members and benefit from exchange: talk to people and volunteer at RecSys.
Enjoy this enriching episode of RECSPERTS - Recommender Systems Experts.
Links from the Episode:
- Manel on Twitter
- Manel on LinkedIn
- Manel at TU Delft (find more papers referenced there)
- SimuRec Workshop at RecSys 2021
- FAccTrec Workshop at RecSys 2021
- Andrew Ng: Unbiggen AI (from IEEE Spectrum)
Papers:
- Slokom et al. (2021): Towards user-oriented privacy for recommender system data: A personalization-based approach to gender obfuscation for user profiles
- Weinsberg et al. (2012): BlurMe: Inferring and Obfuscating User Gender Based on Ratings
- Ekstrand et al. (2018): All The Cool Kids, How Do They Fit In?: Popularity and Demographic Biases in Recommender Evaluation and Effectiveness
- Slokom et al. (2018): Comparing recommender systems using synthetic data
- Burke et al. (2018): Synthetic Attribute Data for Evaluating Consumer-side Fairness
- Burke et al. (2005): Identifying Attack Models for Secure Recommendation
- Narayanan et al. (2008): Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets
General Links:
- Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LivesInAnalogia
- Send me your comments, questions and suggestions to marcel@recsperts.com
- Podcast Website: https://www.recsperts.com/
In episode five my guest is Zeno Gantner, who is a principal applied scientist at Zalando. Zeno obtained his PhD from the University of Hildesheim where he was investigating ML-based recommender systems. As a principal applied scientist he is responsible for strategy, mentoring and setting standards for different initiatives on fashion recommendations impacting over 48 million customers in Europe.
We discuss the ramifications and limitations of positive-only implicit feedback, touch on how reinforcement learning and more rating-like feedback can help as well as how to treat multiple feedback levels. In the main part, we turn our focus towards fashion recommendations and the “usual suspects” of typical e-commerce recommender systems. We also discuss the goal of creating more fashion-specific recommendations and making users come back for inspiration. This involves a lot of domain-specific modeling and design of experiences to cater the needs for various user segments: from fashionistas to pragmatic customers. This also involves putting users into the “driver seat” of recommenders as well as understanding how to achieve long-term customer satisfaction.
Finally, we briefly touch on the topic of size and fit recommendations and finish with an outlook on the future developments leading to fashion recommendations becoming its own subfield within the recommender systems space.
Enjoy this enriching episode of RECSPERTS - Recommender Systems Experts.
Links from this Episode:
- Preferably reach out to Zeno Gantner via email (find his address mentioned by the end of the episode)
- Fashion DNA by Zalando Research (Paper)
- Fashion MNIST (image dataset)
- Workshop on Recommender Systems in Fashion 2021
- RecSys Challenge 2022 on Session-based Fashion Item Recommendation by Dressipi
- H&M Personalized Fashion Recommendation Challenge on Kaggle
- Spotify: A Product Story - Episode 4: Human vs Machine
- Dataset for trivago RecSys Challenge 2019
- RecSys 2020: Tutorial on Conversational Recommender Systems
Papers:
- Rendle et al. (2009): Bayesian Personalized Ranking from Implicit Feedback (2009)
- Loni et al. (2016): Bayesian Personalized Ranking with Multi-Channel User Feedback
- Sheikh et al. (2019): A Deep Learning System for Predicting Size and Fit in Fashion E-Commerce
- Wilhelm et al. (2018): Practical Diversified Recommendations on YouTube with Determinantal Point Processes
General Links:
- Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LivesInAnalogia
- Send me your comments, questions and suggestions to marcel@recsperts.com
- Podcast Website: https://www.recsperts.com/
In episode four my guest is Felice Merra, who is an applied scientist at Amazon. Felice obtained his PhD from Politecnico di Bari where he was a researcher at the Information Systems Lab (SisInf Lab). There, he worked on Security and Adversarial Machine Learning in Recommender Systems.
We talk about different ways to perturb interaction or content data, but also model parameters, and elaborated various defense strategies.
In addition, we touch on the motivation of individuals or whole platforms to perform attacks and look at some examples that Felice has been working on throughout his research.
The overall goals of research in Adversarial Machine Learning for Recommender Systems is to identify vulnerabilities of models and systems in order to derive proper defense strategies that make systems more robust against potential attacks.
Finally, we also briefly discuss privacy-preserving learning and the challenges of further robustification of multimedia recommender systems.
Felice has published multiple papers at KDD, ECIR, SIGIR, and RecSys. He also won the Best Paper Award at KDD's workshop on Adversarial Learning Methods.
Enjoy this enriching episode of RECSPERTS - Recommender Systems Experts.
Links from this Episode:
- Felice's Website
- Felice Merra on LinkedIn and Twitter
- Adversarial Machine Learning in Recommender Systems (PhD Thesis Final Presentation)
- Workshop on Adversarial Personalized Ranking Optimization at ACM KDD 2021 (awarded Best Paper)
- Adversarial Recommender Systems: Attack, Defense, and Advances (chapter in 3rd edition of Recommender Systems Handbook)
- Information Systems Lab (SisInf Lab)
Thesis and Papers:
- Merra et al. (2020): How Dataset Characteristics Affect the Robustness of Collaborative Recommendation Models
- Merra et al. (2021): A survey on Adversarial Recommender Systems: from Attack/Defense strategies to Generative Adversarial Networks
- find all the papers on Felice's website
General Links:
- Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LivesInAnalogia
- Send me your comments, questions and suggestions to marcel@recsperts.com
- Podcast Website: https://www.recsperts.com/
In episode three I am joined by Olivier Jeunen, who is a postdoctoral scientist at Amazon. Olivier obtained his PhD from University of Antwerp with his work "Offline Approaches to Recommendation with Online Success". His work concentrates on Bandits, Reinforcement Learning and Causal Inference for Recommender Systems.
We talk about methods for evaluating online performance of recommender systems in an offline fashion and based on rich logging data. These methods stem from fields like bandit theory and reinforcement learning. They heavily rely on simulators whose benefits, requirements and limitations we discuss in greater detail. We further discuss the differences between organic and bandit feedback as well as what sets recommenders apart from advertising. We also talk about the right target for optimization and receive some advice to continue livelong learning as a researcher, be it in academia or industry.
Olivier has published multiple papers at RecSys, NeurIPS, WSDM, UMAP, and WWW. He also won the RecoGym challenge with his team from University of Antwerp. With research internships at Criteo, Facebook and Spotify Research he brings significant experience to the table.
Enjoy this enriching episode of RECSPERTS - Recommender Systems Experts.
Links from this Episode:
- Olivier's Website
- Olivier Jeunen on LinkedIn and Twitter
- Simulators:
- RecoGym
- RecSim
- RecSimNG
- Open Bandit Pipeline
- Blogpost: Lessons Learned from Winning the RecoGym Challenge
- RecSys 2020 REVEAL Workshop on Bandit and Reinforcement Learning from User Interactions
- RecSys 2021 Tutorial on Counterfactual Learning and Evaluation for Recommender Systems
- NeurIPS 2021 Workshop on Causal Inference and Machine Learning
Thesis and Papers:
- Dissertation: Offline Approaches to Recommendation with Online Success
- Chen et al. (2018): Top-K Off-Policy Correction for a REINFORCE Recommender System
- Jeunen et al. (2021): Disentangling Causal Effects from Sets of Interventions in the Presence of Unobserved Confounders
- Jeunen et al. (2021): Top-𝐾 Contextual Bandits with Equity of Exposure
General Links:
- Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LivesInAnalogia
- Send me your comments, questions and suggestions to marcel@recsperts.com
- Podcast Website: https://www.recsperts.com/
In episode two I am joined by Even Oldridge, Senior Manager at NVIDIA, who is leading the Merlin Team. These people are working on an open-source framework for building large-scale deep learning recommender systems and have already won numerous RecSys competitions.
We talk about the relevance and impact of deep learning applied to recommender systems as well as the challenges and pitfalls of deep learning based recommender systems. We briefly touch on Even's early data science contributions at PlentyOfFish, a Canadian online-dating platform. Starting with personalized recommendations of people to people he transitioned to realtor, a real-estate marketplace. From the potentially biggest social decision in life to the probably biggest financial decision in life he has really been involved with recommender systems at the extremes. At NVIDIA - to which he refers as the one company that works with all the other AI companies - he pushes for Merlin as large-scale, accessible and efficient platform for developing and deploying recommender systems on GPUs.
This brought him also closer to the community which he served as industry Co-Chair at RecSys in 2021 as well as to winning multiple RecSys competitions with his team in the recent years.
Enjoy this enriching episode of RECSPERTS - Recommender Systems Experts.
Links from this Episode:
- Even Oldridge on LinkedIn and Twitter
- NVIDIA Merlin
- NVIDIA Merlin at GitHub
- Even's upcoming Talk at GTC 2021: Building and Deploying Recommender Systems Quickly and Easily with NVIDIA Merlin
- PlentyOfFish, realtor
- fast.ai
- Twitter RecSys Challenge 2021
- Recommending music on Spotify with Deep Learning
Papers
- Dacrema et al. (2019): Are We Really Making Much Progress? A Worrying Analysis of Recent Neural Recommendation Approaches (best paper award at RecSys 2019)
- Jannach et al. (2020): Why Are Deep Learning Models Not Consistently Winning Recommender Systems Competitions Yet?: A Position Paper
- Moreira et al. (2021): Transformers4Rec: Bridging the Gap between NLP and Sequential / Session-Based Recommendation
- Deotte et al. (2021): GPU Accelerated Boosted Trees and Deep Neural Networks for Better Recommender Systems
General Links:
- Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LivesInAnalogia
- Send me your comments, questions and suggestions to marcel@recsperts.com
- Podcast Website: https://www.recsperts.com/
In this first interview we talk to Kim Falk, Senior Data Scientist, multiple RecSys Industry Chair and author of the book "Practical Recommender Systems". We introduce into recommenders from a practical perspective discussing the fundamental difference between content-based and collaborative filtering as well as the cold-start problem - no mathematical deep-dive yet, but expect it to follow. In addition, we reason what constitutes good recommendations and briefly touch on a couple of ways of finding that out.
Looking a bit into the history of the recommender systems community, we touch on the Netflix Prize that was running from 2006 to 2009 as well as on the RecSys - the leading conference in recommender systems, where we also met for the first time.
In the end, we discuss a couple of challenges the field faces, in particular associated with approaches based on deep learning. Besides that, Spiderman will accompany our conversation at certain times. Plus many practical recommendations included on how to get started. Stay tuned!
Links from this Episode:
- Kim Falk on LinkedIn and Twitter
- Book: Practical Recommender Systems (Manning) (get 37% discount with the code podrecsperts37 during checkout)
- GitHub Repository for PRS Book
- ACM Conference on Recommender Systems 2021 (Amsterdam)
- Recommender Systems Specialization at Coursera
- Amazon.com Recommendations: Item-to-Item Collaborative Filtering
- Netflix Prize
- Netflix Prize dataset on Kaggle
- New York Times: A $1 Million Research Bargain for Netflix, and Maybe a Model for Others
- Evaluation Measures for Information Retrieval
- Paper by Dacrema et al. (2019): Are We Really Making Much Progress? A Worrying Analysis of Recent Neural Recommendation Approaches (best paper award at RecSys 2019)
- Recommending music on Spotify with Deep Learning
- MovieLens Recommenders
General Links:
- Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LivesInAnalogia
- Send me your comments, questions and suggestions to marcel@recsperts.com
- Podcast Website: https://www.recsperts.com/
Twitter and LinkedIn posts for sharing:
Have you ever though about how Spotify is able to generate its fantastic Discover Weekly Playlist, how Amazon is generating a fortune by showing what other like you purchased in the past, or how Netflix achieves high user retention? The answer is personalization and in this show we focus on the most prominent way to achieve personalization: recommender systems.
Whether you are a beginner and new to the field or you have already build recommenders, this show is to bring you the experts in recommender systems to share their knowledge and expertise with all of us. It is for making the topic more accessible and to provide a regular coverage of basics and advances in recommender systems research and application. I invite the experts to share their insights and to provide you with the right knowledge to get started and gain expertise yourself.
In this introductory episode I am going to share some exemplary use cases from different industries (music streaming, e-commerce, travel, or social networks) along with challenges and problems in research and application. Plus, I am presenting the first guest for our upcoming episode.
Links from the show:
- ACM Conference on Recommender Systems 2021 (Amsterdam): https://recsys.acm.org/recsys21/
- Introductory Python RecSys Training: https://github.com/mkurovski/recsys_training
- Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LivesInAnalogia
- Read my RecSys Blogposts: https://medium.com/@marcel.kurovski
- Send me your comments, questions and suggestions to marcel@recsperts.com
- Podcast Website: https://www.recsperts.com/