"They just have to be a conservative." "I just prefer my men to be masculine." Purported conservative young women make these statements and more in an ad for new dating app "The Right Stuff," for – you guessed it – right-leaning singles. "We are living in a hyper-political environment. The biggest dealbreaker when it came to dating used to be religion, but more and more we're seeing that replaced by political affiliation," founder John McEntee said in a statement.

There has been a flurry of research in recent years on notions of fairness in ranking and recommender systems, particularly on how to evaluate if a recommender allocates exposure equally across groups of relevant items (also known as provider fairness). While this research has laid an important foundation, it gave rise to different approaches depending on whether relevant items are compared per-user/per-query or aggregated across users. Despite both being established and intuitive, we discover that these two notions can lead to opposite conclusions, a form of Simpson's Paradox. We reconcile these notions and show that the tension is due to differences in distributions of users where items are relevant, and break down the important factors of the user's recommendations. Based on this new understanding, practitioners might be interested in either notions, but might face challenges with the per-user metric due to partial observability of the relevance and user satisfaction, typical in real-world recommenders. We describe a technique based on distribution matching to estimate it in such a scenario. We demonstrate on simulated and real-world recommender data the effectiveness and usefulness of such an approach.

Movies are a great source of entertainment. However, the problem arises when one is trying to find the desired content within this vast amount of data which is significantly increasing every year. Recommender systems can provide appropriate algorithms to solve this problem. The content_based technique has found popularity due to the lack of available user data in most cases. Content_based recommender systems are based on the similarity of items' demographic information; Term Frequency _ Inverse Document Frequency (TF_IDF) and Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) are two approaches used to vectorize data to calculate these similarities. In this paper, we propose a weighted content_based movie RS by combining TF_IDF which is an appropriate approach for embedding textual data such as plot/description, and KGE which is used to embed named entities such as the director's name. The weights between features are determined using a Genetic algorithm. Additionally, the Iranian movies dataset is created by scraping data from movie_related websites. This dataset and the structure of the FarsBase KG are used to create the MovieFarsBase KG which is a component in the implementation process of the proposed content_based RS. Using precision, recall, and F1 score metrics, this study shows that the proposed approach outperforms the conventional approach that uses TF_IDF for embedding all attributes.

In traditional recommender system literature, diversity is often seen as the opposite of similarity, and typically defined as the distance between identified topics, categories or word models. However, this is not expressive of the social science's interpretation of diversity, which accounts for a news organization's norms and values and which we here refer to as normative diversity. We introduce RADio, a versatile metrics framework to evaluate recommendations according to these normative goals. RADio introduces a rank-aware Jensen Shannon (JS) divergence. This combination accounts for (i) a user's decreasing propensity to observe items further down a list and (ii) full distributional shifts as opposed to point estimates. We evaluate RADio's ability to reflect five normative concepts in news recommendations on the Microsoft News Dataset and six (neural) recommendation algorithms, with the help of our metadata enrichment pipeline. We find that RADio provides insightful estimates that can potentially be used to inform news recommender system design.

Federated Recommendation (FR) has received considerable popularity and attention in the past few years. In FR, for each user, its feature vector and interaction data are kept locally on its own client thus are private to others. Without the access to above information, most existing poisoning attacks against recommender systems or federated learning lose validity. Benifiting from this characteristic, FR is commonly considered fairly secured. However, we argue that there is still possible and necessary security improvement could be made in FR. To prove our opinion, in this paper we present FedRecAttack, a model poisoning attack to FR aiming to raise the exposure ratio of target items. In most recommendation scenarios, apart from private user-item interactions (e.g., clicks, watches and purchases), some interactions are public (e.g., likes, follows and comments). Motivated by this point, in FedRecAttack we make use of the public interactions to approximate users' feature vectors, thereby attacker can generate poisoned gradients accordingly and control malicious users to upload the poisoned gradients in a well-designed way. To evaluate the effectiveness and side effects of FedRecAttack, we conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets of different sizes from two completely different scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed FedRecAttack achieves the state-of-the-art effectiveness while its side effects are negligible. Moreover, even with small proportion (3%) of malicious users and small proportion (1%) of public interactions, FedRecAttack remains highly effective, which reveals that FR is more vulnerable to attack than people commonly considered.

Context-aware recommendation systems improve upon classical recommender systems by including, in the modelling, a user's behaviour. Research into context-aware recommendation systems has previously only considered the sequential ordering of items as contextual information. However, there is a wealth of unexploited additional multi-modal information available in auxiliary knowledge related to items. This study extends the existing research by evaluating a multi-modal recommendation system that exploits the inclusion of comprehensive auxiliary knowledge related to an item. The empirical results explore extracting vector representations (embeddings) from unstructured and structured data using data2vec. The fused embeddings are then used to train several state-of-the-art transformer architectures for sequential user-item representations. The analysis of the experimental results shows a statistically significant improvement in prediction accuracy, which confirms the effectiveness of including auxiliary information in a context-aware recommendation system. We report a 4% and 11% increase in the NDCG score for long and short user sequence datasets, respectively.

Fremont, CA: Conversational AI is an umbrella phrase that refers to numerous approaches to allowing computers to converse with humans. This technology extends from simple natural language processing (NLP) models to more powerful machine learning (ML) models capable of interpreting various inputs and carrying on more intricate conversations. Chatbots, which employ NLP to read user inputs and carry on a conversation, is one of the most frequent uses of conversational AI. Examples of such uses are virtual assistants, customer service chatbots, and voice assistants. Well-informed consumers expect to connect via mobile apps, the web, interactive voice response (IVR), chat, or messaging channels. In addition, they want a consistent and engaging experience that is quick, simple, and personalized.

Ahmad Kamal, S. Saaidin and M. Kassim, "Recommender System: Rating predictions of Steam Games Based on Genre and Topic Modelling," 2020 IEEE International Conference on Automatic Control and Intelligent Systems (I2CACIS), 2020, pp.

At RE•WORK, we are strong advocates for supporting women working towards advancing technology, so ahead of the upcoming Toronto AI Summit, on November 9-10, we set out to highlight inspirational women who are working at the forefront of AI developments, and who deserve recognition for their achievements. While we set out to create a list of just 20 – we couldn't narrow it down, as there are so many inspiring and prominent females in this space! Hear from many of them at our Toronto AI Summit, and more at our Women in AI Reception, both being held in Toronto next month. Help us to continue highlighting leading women in AI by nominating your influential woman for our next edition. RE•WORK holds Women in AI events, podcasts, and blogs. Get in touch if you'd like to collaborate or support our initiatives! Doina Precup is a researcher living in Montreal, Canada.

We leverage the Neural Tangent Kernel and its equivalence to training infinitely-wide neural networks to devise $\infty$-AE: an autoencoder with infinitely-wide bottleneck layers. The outcome is a highly expressive yet simplistic recommendation model with a single hyper-parameter and a closed-form solution. Leveraging $\infty$-AE's simplicity, we also develop Distill-CF for synthesizing tiny, high-fidelity data summaries which distill the most important knowledge from the extremely large and sparse user-item interaction matrix for efficient and accurate subsequent data-usage like model training, inference, architecture search, etc. This takes a data-centric approach to recommendation, where we aim to improve the quality of logged user-feedback data for subsequent modeling, independent of the learning algorithm. We particularly utilize the concept of differentiable Gumbel-sampling to handle the inherent data heterogeneity, sparsity, and semi-structuredness, while being scalable to datasets with hundreds of millions of user-item interactions. Both of our proposed approaches significantly outperform their respective state-of-the-art and when used together, we observe 96-105% of $\infty$-AE's performance on the full dataset with as little as 0.1% of the original dataset size, leading us to explore the counter-intuitive question: Is more data what you need for better recommendation?