#27: Recommender Systems at the BBC with Alessandro Piscopo and Duncan Walker

In episode 28 of Recsperts, I sit down with Robin Burke, professor of information science at the University of Colorado Boulder and a leading expert with over 30 years of experience in recommender systems. Together, we explore multistakeholder recommender systems, fairness, transparency, and the role of recommender systems in the age of evolving generative AI.

We begin by tracing the origins of recommender systems, traditionally built around user-centric models. However, Robin challenges this perspective, arguing that all recommender systems are inherently multistakeholder—serving not just consumers as the recipients of recommendations, but also content providers, platform operators, and other key players with partially competing interests. He explains why the common “Recommended for You” label is, at best, an oversimplification and how greater transparency is needed to show how stakeholder interests are balanced.

Our conversation also delves into practical approaches for handling multiple objectives, including reranking strategies versus integrated optimization. While embedding multistakeholder concerns directly into models may be ideal, reranking offers a more flexible and efficient alternative, reducing the need for frequent retraining.

Towards the end of our discussion, we explore post-userism and the impact of generative AI on recommendation systems. With AI-generated content on the rise, Robin raises a critical concern: if recommendation systems remain overly user-centric, generative content could marginalize human creators, diminishing their revenue streams.

Enjoy this enriching episode of RECSPERTS - Recommender Systems Experts.
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• (00:00) - Introduction
• (03:24) - About Robin Burke and First Recommender Systems
• (26:07) - From Fairness and Advertising to Multistakeholder RecSys
• (34:10) - Multistakeholder RecSys Terminology
• (40:16) - Multistakeholder vs. Multiobjective
• (42:43) - Reciprocal and Value-Aware RecSys
• (59:14) - Objective Integration vs. Reranking
• (01:06:31) - Social Choice for Recommendations under Fairness
• (01:17:40) - Post-Userist Recommender Systems
• (01:26:34) - Further Challenges and Closing Remarks

• Robin Burke on LinkedIn
• Robin's Website
• That Recommender Systems Lab
• Reference to Broder's Keynote on Computational Advertising and Recommender Systems from RecSys 2008
• Multistakeholder Recommender Systems (from Recommender Systems Handbook), chapter by Himan Abdollahpouri & Robin Burke
• POPROX: The Platform for OPen Recommendation and Online eXperimentation
• AltRecSys 2024 (Workshop at RecSys 2024)

Papers:

• Burke et al. (1996): Knowledge-Based Navigation of Complex Information Spaces
• Burke (2002): Hybrid Recommender Systems: Survey and Experiments
• Resnick et al. (1997): Recommender Systems
• Goldberg et al. (1992): Using collaborative filtering to weave an information tapestry
• Linden et al. (2003): Amazon.com Recommendations - Item-to-Item Collaborative Filtering
• Aird et al. (2024): Social Choice for Heterogeneous Fairness in Recommendation
• Aird et al. (2024): Dynamic Fairness-aware Recommendation Through Multi-agent Social Choice
• Burke et al. (2024): Post-Userist Recommender Systems : A Manifesto
• Baumer et al. (2017): Post-userism
• Burke et al. (2024): Conducting Recommender Systems User Studies Using POPROX

General Links:

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