Oberon Berlage recently successfully defended his MSc. thesis (title above!) for the Data Science Master at University of Amsterdam, and graduated with a whopping 9!
He’s the first academic offspring of our AI Team @ FD Mediagroep, and worked on BNR SMART Radio‘s segmenter. Oberon improved our text-based segmenter by adding audio embeddings, improving the F1 score with +32%!
His thesis is now online, check it out at: http://scriptiesonline.uba.uva.nl/document/673254
Yesterday BNR SMART Radio won two Dutch Interactive Awards (DIA 2019) Awards! We were nominated together with Elastique, the folks who designed the UX/interface of our BNR SMART Radio app which you can download here (or in your app stores, both Android/iOS)!
We won Gold in the category “Content”. Why, you may ask?
“Finally a reason to listen to Radio in general, and BNR in particular. Because advertising is absent and topics are tailored to the personal taste of the listener, who can search in a targeted way and express appreciation for a broadcast through a thumbsup, they reach new target audiences online.”
jury report (source: emerce)
Next to this, we also won the Silver DIA2019 Award in the category “Disruptor”!
“In a world where radio has never deviated from the linear model, the jury finds this very disruptive. SMART Radio provides a personal radio experience and possibly a new revenue model in the long term. The jury members find the potential of the underlying strategy even more impressive. What if BNR joins forces with FD Mediagroep and combines the work of both parties in this? The jury sees all kinds of opportunities to fit in new forms of advertising (or to omit them). The collaboration between the agency and the media company has resulted in something that has never been seen before.”
jury report (source: emerce)
For who has trouble keeping track 😅, these are the awards we won with SMART Radio:
🏆 Marconi Online Award
🏆 AMMA Award (with SMART Journalism)
🏆 DIA2019 Award, category: Content
🥈 DIA2019 Award, category: Disruptor
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 🤓
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.
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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:
#DIR2019 will try something new. Top ranked IR papers from WWW, WSDM, CIKM, NeurIPS, RecSys, CHI, CHIIR, KDD, ECIR, ACL, EMNLP (in no particular order, open to suggestions) with authors in NL & BE will be invited to present their work in a lightning talk⚡#DIR2018
— DIR 2019 – Lightning talk Edition (@dir_2019) 23 november 2018
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 ⚡.
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.
Read more about SMART Radio in our demo paper, presented at DIR 2018:
![[PDF]](https://i1.wp.com/graus.nu/blog/wp-content/plugins/papercite/img/pdf.png?ssl=1)
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. @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}
}Yesterday I gave a (tongue-in-cheek) talk on algorithmic personalization at the VOGIN-IP Lezing 2018, and brought five pieces of evidence to prove the “filter bubble” doesn’t exist. Check out my slides (in Dutch) by clicking on the picture below!
For Company.info I wrote a short blog post explaining the current state-of-the-art, our current, and future projects that involve machine learning and company information. Click the image below to read the post! (in Dutch)
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..
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);
Company.info wrote a small blog post about it, check it out here: Meetup: het succes van algoritmen en systemen voor personalisatie en aanbevelingen