Financial News Mining Talk @ PyData Hilversum edition

I gave this talk at ReTry! PyData Hilversum edition: RTL hosts PyData

Here are the slides of a talk I gave at the Data Science Northeast Netherlands Meetup and PyData, 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..

In “Denktank” on algorithms, behavioral analysis, and personalization

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.

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

Featured in FD on the value of (personal) data

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”;

De kennis die met die cookies wordt verzameld, wordt vervolgens verkocht aan nog eens tientallen bedrijven die daarmee hun reclameboodschappen gericht kunnen afvuren. ‘Waar je ook komt op het web, je laat altijd digitale sporen na’, zegt David Graus, die twee weken geleden promoveerde op dit onderwerp aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam. ‘Uit al die sporen voorspellen de bedrijven je gedrag en op basis daarvan plaatsen ze een advertentie.’ […]

De mogelijkheden met data gaan verder, stelt Graus. Stel dat op basis van gedrag van vrienden, familieleden, likes, posts en zoekopdrachten wordt geconcludeerd dat je rookt. Terwijl je dat zelf nooit hebt aangegeven. ‘Daarmee geef je privacy weg’, aldus Graus.

Read the full article here.

Roundtable at De Balie on ‘The power of algorithms, how algorithms shape our lives’

Update: see the opening talk I gave on what algorithms are, here: Mini-college “Hoe algoritmen ons leven vormgeven”

On Sunday, June 18th I will participate in a roundtable at De Balie on the power of algorithms, along with (a very nice lineup:) Wouter van Noort, Naomi Jacobs, Marjolein Lanzing, Rutger Rienks, and Hans de Zwart.

For more information (and tickets), see: De macht van data, De Balie.

My PhD Thesis “Entities of Interest — Discovery in Digital Traces” is online!

My PhD thesis, Entities of Interest — Discovery in Digital Traces is now available for download. Click on the cover below to head to graus.nu/entities-of-interest and grab your electronic copy of the little booklet that took me 4+ years to write!

Panel discussion on Data & Democracy

On Tuesday May 9th I will participate in a panel discussion on Data & Democracy, which will revolve around the impact of (big) data (mining), profiling, and political micro-targeting on politics and campaigning of the future. Data & Democracy is organized by the Personalised Communication group (a joint effort between UvA’s Communication Science & Information Law groups). See this article (in Dutch) and the flyer (below) for more information!

Keynote on Big Data, Machine Learning, and Algorithmic Bias at the Royal Marechaussee

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I was invited to give the opening keynote at the Intelligence Day of the Koninklijke Marechaussee (Military Police) on Big Data and Machine Learning, with the aim to explain the audience what ML and Big Data is.

I spent a disproportionate amount of time on Algorithmic Bias, because I think this is a hugely important topic — in particular for this audience! See the slides of my talk (in Dutch) below, or on slideshare:

Interview in Tekstblad: “Searching for truth in 11.5M documents”

Tekstblad (a magazine for text professionals) contains an interview with Hans Henseler and myself, on the “Semantic Search for E-Discovery” project I have been involved with during my PhD. The title loosely translates to “Searching for truth in 11.5M documents.” (click the image for the PDF).

Click for the PDF
Click for the PDF

James Chen Best Student Paper Award at UMAP 2016

Our paper,

  • [PDF] [DOI] D. Graus, P. N. Bennett, R. W. White, and E. Horvitz, “Analyzing and predicting task reminders,” in Proceedings of the 2016 conference on user modeling adaptation and personalization, New York, NY, USA, 2016, p. 7–15.
    [Bibtex] 
    @inproceedings{graus2016analyzing,
author = {Graus, David and Bennett, Paul N. and White, Ryen W. and Horvitz, Eric},
title = {Analyzing and Predicting Task Reminders},
year = {2016},
isbn = {9781450343688},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/2930238.2930239},
doi = {10.1145/2930238.2930239},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on User Modeling Adaptation and Personalization},
pages = {7–15},
numpages = {9},
keywords = {prospective memory, reminders, log studies, intelligent assistant},
location = {Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada},
series = {UMAP '16}
}

was awarded best student paper, at UMAP 2016!

Me receiving the award during the UMAP banquet dinner at the Marriott Harbourfront Hotel, Halifax. Photo by Denis Parra.

Algorithms aren’t neutral. And that’s a good thing.

Below is an article I wrote with Maarten de Rijke, which was published in nrc.next and NRC Handelsblad under a somewhat misleading title (which wasn’t ours). I cleaned up a Google Translate translation of this article. The translation is far from perfect, but I believe gets the main point across. You can read the original article in Blendle (for €0.29) or on NRC.nl (for free).

See the article in NRC
The article in NRC
Continue reading “Algorithms aren’t neutral. And that’s a good thing.”