15th September
CET 09:15-10:15
Beijing 15:15-16:15
Sydney 17:15-18:15
New York 03:15-04:15
San Francisco 00:15-01:15
Modeling search engine performance measurement
The information retrieval (IR) community is rightly proud of its passion for evaluation. This conference has been a welcome refuge when passion becomes obsession. ICTIR’s transformation from a largely mathematically based theoretical forum to one that seeks generalizable observations from all areas perfectly suits the needs of IR. However, how much have researchers sought to generalize or model search from evaluation? I will present a set of research papers by others as well as my collaborators and I that since the early 1990s have reported generalizing observations from large scale tests. It’s only relatively recently that I’ve come to realise that these results have been missed by many in the community, yet the models produced carry a great deal of valuable generalizing information about our retrieval systems.
Mark Sanderson
(RMIT University, Australia)
Mark Sanderson is Professor of Information Retrieval at RMIT University where he is head of the RMIT Information Retrieval (IR) group. Mark received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Glasgow, United Kingdom, in 1997. He has raised over $10 million dollars in grant income, published hundreds of papers, and has over 9,000 citations to his work. He has 25 current and/or past PhD students. In collaboration with one student, Mark was the first show the value of snippets, a component of search interfaces which are now a standard feature of all search engines. One of Mark’s papers was given an honourable mention at SIGIR’s 2017 test of time awards. Mark has been co-editor of Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval; associate editor of IEEE TKDE, ACM TOIS, ACM TWeb, and IP&M; and served on the editorial boards of IRJ and JASIST. Mark was general chair of ACM SIGIR in 2004. He was a PC chair of ACM SIGIR 2009 & 2012; and ACM CIKM 2017. Prof Sanderson is also a visiting professor at NII in Tokyo.
16th September
CET 09:00-10:00
Beijing 15:00-16:00
Sydney 17:00-18:00
New York 03:00-04:00
San Francisco 00:00-01:00
Personalising and diversifying the listening experience
Spotify is the biggest and most popular audio streaming platform available today, with as of June 2020, over 250 million monthly active users across 92 markets worldwide listening to over 60 million tracks and 1.5M podcast titles. We help this audio find the right audience via our recommendation products, which include playlist recommendation, playlist sequencing, and podcast show and episode recommendation. A large percentage of audio consumption is from Home or Search, which make them valuable spaces for surfacing personalised and diverse content. This talk will present some of the research we completed on how to personalize the listening experience, and what diversity means in the context of a personalised listening experience.
Mounia Lalmas
(Spotify)
Mounia Lalmas is a Director of Research at Spotify, and the Head of Tech Research in Personalization. Mounia also holds an honorary professorship at University College London. Before that, she was a Director of Research at Yahoo, where she led a team of researchers working on advertising quality for Gemini, Yahoo’s native advertising platform. She also worked with various teams at Yahoo on topics related to user engagement in the context of news, search, and user generated content. Prior to this, she held a Microsoft Research/RAEng Research Chair at the School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow. Before that, she was Professor of Information Retrieval at the Department of Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London. Her work focuses on studying user engagement in areas such as native advertising, digital media, social media, search, and now audio. She has given numerous talks and tutorials on these and related topics, including a WWW 2019 tutorial on ‘Online User Engagement: Metrics and Optimization’, which will also be given at KDD 2020. She is regularly a senior programme committee member at conferences such as WSDM, KDD, WWW and SIGIR. She was co-programme chair for SIGIR 2015, WWW 2018 and WSDM 2020. She is also the co-author of a book written as the outcome of her WWW 2013 tutorial on ‘measuring user engagement.
