"Recommender systems" on the internet that provide automated suggestions based on previous user activities can be helpful, but they also have their downsides: Product recommendations on online shopping platforms that are very similar over and over again quickly become monotonous, while in digital news consumption, the constant suggestion of news reports that are similar to those previously read can even "lock" the user into a problematic filter bubble in which complex topics are inadmissibly simplified by one-sided reporting.
It is precisely these problems that Head of Laboratory Julia Neidhardt and her team at the CD Laboratory for Advancing the State-of-the-Art of Recommender Systems in Multi-Domain Settings, which was officially opened yesterday at TU Wien, are tackling: Thanks to close cooperation with corporate partners, the smallest changes in their online systems can be viewed and examined live and over a period of time instead of, as in previous recommender systems research, only being able to start from historically collected data sets. This gives researchers a completely different set of possibilities to explore the relationships between the parameters of "accuracy", "diversity" and "fairness", and ultimately to create the conditions for much more varied and differentiated automated recommendations on the internet in the future!
The photo (© Amélie Chapalain / TU Wien Informatics) shows how highly attended the lab opening was - from left to right:
Univ.-Prof. Dr. Hannes Werthner (Former Professor and former Dean of the Faculty of Informatics, TU Wien)
DI Bernhard Krüpl-Sypien (Managing Director, YKMB Software GmbH)
Dr. Julia Neidhardt (Head of the CD Laboratory for Advancing the State-of-the-Art of Recommender Systems in Multi-Domain Settings, TU Wien)
Univ.-Prof. DI Dr. Johannes Fröhlich (Vice Rector for Research and Innovation, TU Wien )
Florian Jungnikl-Gossy, MA (Chief Product Officer, Falter Verlagsgesellschafts m.b.H.)
Mag. Siegmar Schlager (Managing Director, Falter Verlagsgesellschafts m.b.H.)
MR Dr. Ulrike Unterer (Vice President of the Christian Doppler Research Association and Head of Department for Key Technologies at the BMDW)