David
Graus

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:

• Geef niet het algoritme de schuld

Really excited to have co-authored “Reading News with a Purpose,” which was accepted at the International Workshop on Transparent Personalization Methods based on Heterogeneous Personal Data (ExHUM), at UMAP 2019!

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!

This is work that came out of our ICT with Industry project “Opening the black box of user profiles in content-based recommender systems” where we (FD Mediagroep) collaborated with Nava Tintarev and our excellent team of academics in a week-long academic hackathon!

Read the pre-print, below:

• 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}
  }

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.

(more…)

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 ⚡.

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:

I created another logo!

It is the textpipe logo, for textpipe;

a Python package for converting raw text in to clean, readable text and extracting metadata from that text.

textpipe’s readme

A package we’re developing together with our friends at De Persgroep and RTL Nederland :-).

In the latest AI Podcast, I am featured, talking with Li’ao Wang on our SMART Radio and SMART Journalism projects. Stream the episode below!

“Media is smart, but needs to get smarter. That’s what we’re working on here at the FD Mediagroep. Come and see what we do with AI to make our creators and content better.”

Stream on BNR

Stream on Spotify

• Read more at BNR.nl
• Link to episode on Spotify

We’re demo’ing SMART Radio at The 17th Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval workshop (DIR 2018). We wrote a short paper titled “SMART Radio: Personalized News Radio” to accompany the demo, read it by clicking below!