Category: Blog

We won the AMMA Media-innovation award for our News Personalization projects at FD Mediagroep!

After winning the Marconi award for radio innovation, yesterday we picked up the AMMA Award for Media Innovation for our news personalization efforts at FD Mediagroep (both SMART Journalism for Het FD and SMART Radio for BNR Nieuwsradio)!

It’s really great to see that our current investment into AI and innovation seems to resonate with the outside world 🤖. And I am really happy to be with a company that sees this development as such an important direction that we are able to work with a big and talented team of data scientists, interns, engineers, and product folks 🤓

Een lijstje zoekresultaten is geen etalage

I wrote a response on recent coverage around the alleged ‘promotion’ of anti-vax books by bol.com, suggesting it is due to “influential, steering, algorithms.” In this piece I state it’s not an issue of algorithms, but of long-tail, obscure, content. My response was published in Het Parool, as an edited letter. Read the original, unedited piece (in Dutch) below.

Continue reading “Een lijstje zoekresultaten is geen etalage”

Co-organizing DIR 2019!

Together with Anne Schuth and Daan Odijk I’ll be co-organizing The Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval workshop (DIR 2019). At DIR 2018, we sat down during lunch and came up with the following plan:

We also decided on a date: November 29, 2019!

For now, the most import work is done (designing a logo, and setting up our Twitter account ;-)). Stay tuned for more, later! And follow @dir_2019 for now âš¡.

BNR SMART Radio wins the Marconi Online Award!

Really happy and proud of our amazing AI team for winning the (first) Marconi Online Award at the Gouden RadioRing Gala, for BNR SMART Radio!

SMART Radio is the first product that comes out of our FD Mediagroup AI team! SMART Radio is released in beta for iOS (anytime) and Android, give it a try by downloading it here: https://bnr.nl/smartradio.

Image: BNR

Read more about SMART Radio in our demo paper, presented at DIR 2018:

  • [PDF] M. Sappelli, D. M. Chu, B. Cambel, J. Nortier, and D. Graus, “Smart radio: personalized news radio,” in The 17th dutch-belgian information retrieval workshop, 2018.
    [Bibtex] 
    @inproceedings{sappelli2018smartradio,
title={SMART Radio: Personalized News Radio},
author={Sappelli, Maya and Chu, Dung Manh and Cambel, Bahadir and Nortier, Joeri and Graus, David},
booktitle={The 17th Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval workshop},
year={2018}
}


Financial News Mining @ FD Mediagroep/Company.info Slidedeck

Here are the slides of a talk I gave at the Data Science Northeast Netherlands Meetup, where I detail the custom in-house entity linking framework, sentiment analysis, and entity salience scoring model we developed for Company.info (part of FD Mediagroep), in addition to showing some example applications of our corpus of news articles linked to organization profiles.

I’m sharing it here because I think it’s cool, since it’s one of the first project I’ve done at Company.info! Gives you some idea of what we’re working on..

Hosted 8th Recsys Amsterdam Meetup

Thursday 19 October, I had the pleasure of hosting the 8th Recommender Systems Amsterdam meetup at FDMG/Company.info. The meetup’s theme was media-content recsys, and we had three talks from industry, dealing with recommending tv programs, music videos, and text articles);

  1. Ghida Ibrahim (Senior Data Scientist, (formerly at) Liberty Global): “Recommender systems for video and TV products”
  2. Bouke Huurnink and Roman Ivanov (XITE): “Music Video Recommendation@XITE”
  3. Robbert van der Pluijm (Head of Bibblio Labs, Bibblio): “Scaling a recommendation service – a threefold story”

Company.info wrote a small blog post about it, check it out here: Meetup: het succes van algoritmen en systemen voor personalisatie en aanbevelingen