The paper we wrote with former FD team mates Feng Lu and Anca Dumitrache has been accepted for publication as a long paper at UMAP 2020, the 28th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization! (I fondly remember my last time at UMAP, in 2016 😏)

We have published a preprint of this paper, get it: here, or from arXiv.

• F. Lu, A. Dumitrache, and D. Graus, “Beyond optimizing for clicks: incorporating editorial values in news recommendation,” in Proceedings of the 28th acm conference on user modeling, adaptation and personalization, New York, NY, USA, 2020, p. 145–153.
  [Bibtex]

  @inproceedings{lu2020beyond,
  author = {Lu, Feng and Dumitrache, Anca and Graus, David},
  title = {Beyond Optimizing for Clicks: Incorporating Editorial Values in News Recommendation},
  year = {2020},
  isbn = {9781450368612},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3340631.3394864},
  doi = {10.1145/3340631.3394864},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 28th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization},
  pages = {145–153},
  numpages = {9},
  keywords = {usefulness, news recommendation, editorial values},
  location = {Genoa, Italy},
  series = {UMAP ’20}
  }

Update 08/05: Cool, @NickKivits mentioned our paper in his Villamedia column: “Het idee van de filterbubbel kan in de prullenbak“ and newsletter (with over 11k subscribers!)

I am particularly happy with this work because:

1️⃣ In our paper we show how you can align algorithm design across stakeholders (in this case: data scientists and journalists), by effectively modeling an editorial value (“dynamicness”) in the news recommender of Het Financieele Dagblad without losing accuracy.

2️⃣ We present (more) empirical proof that #recsys (can) offer(s) users *more* diverse, serendipitous, and dynamic lists of articles, compared to editorially curated lists, and hence (can) help in *avoiding*, not creating filter bubbles!

3️⃣ It is the perfect wrap-up of our Google DNI-funded “SMART Journalism” project at FD Mediagroep (we wrote most of the paper in our spare time after the project ended).

See below the video of the talk at UMAP 2020 below: