MediaFutures and UiBs research group DARS which stands for Behavioral Data Analytics & Recommender Systems, is inviting to a seminar with the postdoctoral researcher Denis Kotkov from the University of Helsinki. Kotkov is working on recommender systems, exploratory search, user experience and machine learning.

In this seminar he will provide an overview of the Serendipity in Recommender Systems.

Abstract:

“Have you ever wondered why services like Spotify, Netflix or YouTube keep showing you recommendations on the same topic over and over again? One of the reasons for that is the lack of serendipity in recommender systems of these services. Recommender systems are software tools that suggest items, such as audio recordings or videos, of interest to users. Meanwhile, serendipity is the property of these systems, which indicates the degree, to which they suggest items that pleasantly surprise users. In this talk, I will provide an overview of serendipity in recommender systems. In particular, I will talk about how the concept of serendipity has been defined and measured in recommender systems, and what experiments have been conducted to investigate this concept. I will also touch on recommendation algorithms designed to suggest serendipitous items and discuss future directions of the top.”

More about Denis Kotkov.

The talk will take place at MediaFutures headquarter and takes 30 minutes, plus a 15-minute-long Q&A session. The seminar will also be streamed. You can find the link below.