Data Skeptic

What if you could simply tell a recommendation system what you want instead of relying on likes, dislikes, and watch history? Kyle Polich talks with Fuyuan Lyu about the DPR framework, which combines large language models and traditional recommender systems to give users direct control over recommendations through natural language. Together they explore how conversational interfaces could transform platforms like YouTube, TikTok, a...

Kyle Polich sits down with Yashar Deldjoo, research scientist and Associate Professor at the Polytechnic University of Bari, to explore how recommender systems have evolved and why trustworthiness matters. They unpack key dimensions of responsible AI, including robustness to adversarial attacks, privacy, explainability, and fairness, and discuss how LLMs introduce new risks like hallucinations.

The episode closes with a look at "ag...

Goodreads star ratings can be misleading as measures of "book quality," and research from Hannes Rosenbusch suggests that for many professionally published books, differences between readers often matter more than differences between books. The episode also explores how to model reader preferences, why reviews often reveal more about the reviewer than the text, and how LLMs can aid computational literary research while still fallin...

Ervin Dervishaj, a PhD student at the University of Copenhagen, discusses his research on disentangled representation learning in recommender systems, finding that while disentanglement strongly correlates with interpretability, it doesn't consistently improve recommendation performance. The conversation explores how disentanglement acts as a regularizer that can enhance user trust and interpretability at the potential cost of some...

Ekaterina (Kat) Fedorova from MIT EECS joins us to discuss strategic learning in recommender systems—what happens when users collectively coordinate to game recommendation algorithms. Kat's research reveals surprising findings: algorithmic "protest movements" can paradoxically help platforms by providing clearer preference signals, and the challenge of distinguishing coordinated behavior from bot activity is more complex than...

In this episode, host Kyle Polich speaks with Roan Schellingerhout, a fourth-year PhD student at Maastricht University, about explainable multi-stakeholder recommender systems for job recruitment. Roan discusses his research on creating AI-powered job matching systems that balance the needs of multiple stakeholders—job seekers, recruiters, HR professionals, and companies. The conversation explores different types of explanati...

In this episode, we explore the fascinating world of recommender systems and algorithmic fairness with David Liu, Assistant Research Professor at Cornell University's Center for Data Science for Enterprise and Society. David shares insights from his research on how machine learning models can inadvertently create unfairness, particularly for minority and niche user groups, even without any malicious intent. We dive deep into his gr...

In this episode, Kyle Polich sits down with Cory Zechmann, a content curator working in streaming television with 16 years of experience running the music blog "Silence Nogood." They explore the intersection of human curation and machine learning in content discovery, discussing the concept of "algatorial" curation—where algorithms and editorial expertise work together. Key topics include the...

In this episode, Santiago de Leon takes us deep into the world of eye tracking and its revolutionary applications in recommender systems. As a researcher at the Kempelin Institute and Brno University, Santiago explains the mechanics of eye tracking technology—how it captures gaze data and processes it into fixations and saccades to reveal user browsing patterns. He introduces the groundbreaking RecGaze dataset, the first eye ...

In this episode of Data Skeptic, we dive deep into the technical foundations of building modern recommender systems. Unlike traditional machine learning classification problems where you can simply apply XGBoost to tabular data, recommender systems require sophisticated hybrid approaches that combine multiple techniques. Our guest, Boya Xu, an assistant professor of marketing at Virginia Tech, walks us through a cutting-edge method...

In this episode of Data Skeptic, we explore the fascinating intersection of recommender systems and digital humanities with guest Florian Atzenhofer-Baumgartner, a PhD student at Graz University of Technology. Florian is working on Monasterium.net, Europe's largest online collection of historical charters, containing millions of medieval and early modern documents from across the continent. The conversation delves into why tra...

In this episode of Data Skeptic's Recommender Systems series, host Kyle Polich explores DataRec, a new Python library designed to bring reproducibility and standardization to recommender systems research. Guest Alberto Carlo Maria Mancino, a postdoc researcher from Politecnico di Bari, Italy, discusses the challenges of dataset management in recommendation research—from version control issues to preprocessing inconsistencies&...

In this episode of Data Skeptic's Recommender Systems series, Kyle sits down with Aditya Chichani, a senior machine learning engineer at Walmart, to explore the darker side of recommendation algorithms. The conversation centers on shilling attacks—a form of manipulation where malicious actors create multiple fake profiles to game recommender systems, either to promote specific items or sabotage competitors. Aditya, who resear...

In this episode, Rebecca Salganik, a PhD student at the University of Rochester with a background in vocal performance and composition, discusses her research on fairness in music recommendation systems. She explores three key types of fairness—group, individual, and counterfactual—and examines how algorithms create challenges like popularity bias (favoring mainstream content) and multi...

In this episode, we speak with Ashmi Banerjee, a doctoral candidate at the Technical University of Munich, about her pioneering research on AI-powered recommender systems in tourism. Ashmi illuminates how these systems can address exposure bias while promoting more sustainable tourism practices through innovative approaches to data acquisition and algorithm design.  Key highlights include leveraging large language models for s...