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%!
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)!
🥇 Content
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.”
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.”
In the context of the upcoming workshop “AI and Journalism” Bennie Mols interviewed me for the website of the European Science-Media Hub, on how we apply AI in journalism for Het FD and BNR. Read the piece here:
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 🤓
In response to my op-ed in Het Parool, Jim Stolze interviewed me and published the interview on the website of De Nationale AI Cursus (a free online course/MOOC on AI aimed at the general public); Read the article below:
With the largest list of authors (ranging from philosophers via polcomm researchers to computer scientists), from a wide array of institutions; Emily Sullivan, Dimitrios Bountouridis, Jaron Harambam, Shabnam Najafian, Felicia Loecherbach, Mykola Makhortykh, Domokos Kelen, Darcia Wilkinson, and Nava Tintarev!
E. Sullivan, D. Bountouridis, J. Harambam, S. Najafian, F. Loecherbach, M. Makhortykh, D. Kelen, D. Wilkinson, D. Graus, and N. Tintarev, “Reading news with a purpose: explaining user profiles for self-actualization,” in Adjunct publication of the 27th conference on user modeling, adaptation and personalization, 2019, p. 241–245. [Bibtex]
@inproceedings{sullivan2019reading,
title={Reading news with a purpose: Explaining user profiles for self-actualization},
author={Sullivan, Emily and Bountouridis, Dimitrios and Harambam, Jaron and Najafian, Shabnam and Loecherbach, Felicia and Makhortykh, Mykola and Kelen, Domokos and Wilkinson, Daricia and Graus, David and Tintarev, Nava},
booktitle={Adjunct Publication of the 27th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization},
pages={241--245},
year={2019},
url={https://doi.org/10.1145/3314183.3323456},
doi={10.1145/3314183.3323456}
}
Read the original idea that sparked the project, presented at the 2nd FATREC Workshop at RecSys 2018, here:
D. Graus, M. Sappelli, and D. M. Chu, “Let me tell you who you are,” in The 2nd fatrec workshop on responsible recommendation, 2018. [Bibtex]
@inproceedings{graus2018let,
title={Let me tell you who you are},
author={Graus, David and Sappelli, Maya and Chu, Dung Manh},
booktitle={The 2nd FATREC Workshop on Responsible Recommendation},
year={2018}
}
📅 March 23, 2019 •
🕐 10:00 •
🏷 Blog and Media and Writing •
👁 338
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.
De Volksrant wrote published an article on Dutch robo-journalism, where I’m featured on explaining our SMART Journalism recommender system + abstractive summarization plans.
Read the article by clicking on the image below:
And read more about our SMART Journalism project in our position paper:
M. Sappelli, D. M. Chu, B. Cambel, D. Graus, and P. Bressers, “Smart journalism: personalizing, summarizing, and recommending financial economic news,” in The algorithmic personalization and news (apen18) workshop at icwsm ’18, 2018. [Bibtex]
@inproceedings{sappelli2018smart,
title={SMART Journalism: Personalizing, Summarizing, and Recommending Financial Economic News},
author={Sappelli, Maya and Chu, Dung Manh and Cambel, Bahadir and Graus, David and Bressers, Philippe},
booktitle={The Algorithmic Personalization and News (APEN18) Workshop at ICWSM '18},
year={2018}
}
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 ⚡.
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]](https://i2.wp.com/graus.nu/blog/wp-content/plugins/papercite/img/pdf.png?ssl=1)
![[DOI]](https://i1.wp.com/graus.nu/blog/wp-content/plugins/papercite/img/external.png?resize=10%2C10&ssl=1){kind=small}
