Seminar • Data Systems | Recommender Systems — Towards Effective Recommendation: Data and Model

Tuesday, February 23, 2021 12:00 pm - 12:00 pm EST (GMT -05:00)

Please note: This seminar will be given online.

Chen Ma, School of Computer Science
McGill University

With the development of Internet services and mobile devices, Internet users can easily access a large number of online products and services. Although this growth provides users with more available choices, it is also difficult for users to pick up one of the most favorite items out of plenty of candidates. To reduce information overload and satisfy the diverse needs of users, personalized recommender systems come into being and play more and more important roles in modern society.

In this talk, two directions will be presented to better understand the user preference and improve the recommendation performance. Firstly, I will present how to effectively utilize auxiliary data, such as geographical coordinates of locations and temporal orders of items. In particular, dedicated modules will be introduced to model the user interest in a fine-grained manner. Secondly, I will present how to build effective models to make good use of the user-item interactions. Specifically, effective models like graph neural networks and adaptive/personalized hyper-parameter learning mechanisms will be described. Lastly, I will conclude with a broader vision of recommendation techniques beyond the recommendation accuracy.


Bio: Chen Ma is a Ph.D. candidate of the School of Computer Science at McGill University, supervised by Prof. Xue (Steve) Liu. His research is on the intersection of recommender systems and deep learning. The central theme driving his research is searching for effective auxiliary information, powerful models, adaptive/personalized hyper-parameters, and fairness-aware recommendation results. One of his works has been deployed in a real-world Mobile App Store with millions of monthly active users.


To join this seminar on Zoom, please go to https://zoom.us/j/92536277123?pwd=YzJWbTBDcXE4TG5Edmt0aExaUVBxUT09