December 20, 2022
In the context of the monthly Fridays’ AI talks, digital talks on emerging issues in Artificial Intelligence, organized by the MSc in Artificial Intelligence, the talk of Mr. Georgios Halkiadakis , Associate Professor, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Technical University of Crete, took place on Friday 16 December 2022.
The topic of the talk was “Employing Social Choice Theory for Personalized and Group Recommendations”
A few words about the talk:
“In this talk, I will be describing recent research conducted in my group to tackle both the personalized and group recommendations problems, using Machine Learning and Social Choice Theory. More specifically, we build our (Bayesian) recommendation algorithms following the “you are what you consume” (Babas et al, 2013) principle, while a key novelty in our approach is the application of multiwinner voting rules to increase recommendations’ diversity and fairness.
We conduct a systematic experimental evaluation of our approaches by applying them on a real-world dataset of Points of Interest (POIs) in the popular touristic destination of Agios Nikolaos, Crete; also exploiting information collected via questionnaires from actual tourists visiting the city of Agios Nikolaos. Our experimental results (i) highlight the ability of our systems to successfully produce personalized recommendations that match the specific interests of a single user; (ii) confirm that the employment of prior knowledge regarding the preferences of tourists, based on their demographics, guides our recommender to avoid the cold-start problem; (iii) demonstrate that the use of multiwinner mechanisms allows for diverse recommendations with respect to travel-related features, and increased system performance in the case of limited user-system interactions; and (iv) show that the use of multiwinner mechanisms allows for fair group recommendations with respect to the well-known m-PROPORTIONALITY and m-ENVY-FREENESS metrics. Last but not least, our personalized Bayesian recommendation algorithm is incorporated in a real-world mobile tour-planning application for Agios Nikolaos, Crete”.
