David
Graus

Stimuleringsfonds voor de Journalistiek published an article on ‘robo-journalism’, where I say something about the SMART Journalism project we are doing at FDMG, which involves personalization and summarization of newspaper articles. Read it here! (pdf). Snippet:

Door introteksten te personaliseren, kun je meer doelgroepen bedienen.’ Bij het genereren van gepersonaliseerde intro’s op basis van artikelen, komt behoorlijk wat techniek kijken, vertelt David Graus, lead data scientist van het project bij het FD. ‘In de robotjournalistiek wordt nu vooral gewerkt aan het omzetten van gestructureerde data naar teksten. Wat wij willen is teksten maken op basis van door mensen geschreven teksten. Dat is behoorlijk cutting edge. We hebben daarom ook nauwelijks voorbeelden waar we ons op kunnen baseren.’

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!

The journal paper “The birth of collective memories: Analyzing emerging entities in text streams” I wrote with Daan Odijk and Maarten de Rijke is now (finally) published at JASIST! It is published under OpenAccess/CC BY 4.0 and available in “early view” (published before it’s published) in the Wiley Online Library. Click on the image below to access it:

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)

Our paper “The Birth of Collective Memories: Analyzing Emerging Entities in Text Streams” was accepted for publication at JASIST (the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology)! Grab a pre-print here:

This paper is is:
1. My first journal paper
2. Based on Chapter 3 of my PhD thesis “Entities of Interest — Discovery in Digital Traces”
3. The first collabo on a paper (on paper) between the FD Mediagroep, Blendle, and the UvA
4. The tombstone on my academic career! (?)

In this paper we study news and social media streams spanning over 18 months, and comprising over 579 million documents, and analyze ’emergence patterns’ of entities, i.e., how a real-world entity (such as a person, organization, product, etc.) appears in these documents in the timespan between the entity’s first mention in online text streams, and when an article devoted to the entity is subsequently added to Wikipedia.

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..

My debut on national TV ;-)! Denktank is a TV show where youngsters explore and think about how (current day) technology will affect them in the future. In this episode I explain some of the mechanisms behind algorithmic personalization.

Stream the episode at NPO.nl (the part with me starts at about 05:00), or see the website of Human for more information on the episode.

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

In today’s edition of Het Financieele Dagblad, I am quoted in an article on the value of (personal) data titled “Wanneer je gegevens geld waard zijn”;

Voor de debatavond De Macht van Data gaf ik een korte inleiding over algoritmen. Wat is een algoritme? Hoe werkt een algoritme? En waar komen we algoritmen tegen?