Chien Lu received a runner up award for best student paper at ACML 2021. In this interview, he tells us about the implications of this research, the methodology, and plans for future work. Our paper is entitled "Cross-structural factor-topic model: document analysis with sophisticated covariates." This paper proposes a novel topic model to analyze text documents with sophisticated covariates. Text data are usually accompanied by various numerical covariates in many real-world situations.

Once again, Spider-Man will have video game players caught in his web. On Thursday, Sony launched Marvel's "Spider-Man: Miles Morales along with its highly-anticipated PlayStation 5 video game console. It features everything you could want from a Spider-Man game: high-flying through downtown New York, breaking up crimes and pummeling villains with a wide array of tricks. In this Spiderverse, Peter Parker is Spider-Man, with Miles as his protégé after he, too, gets bit by a spider and develops superhuman powers. An older Peter needs to leave the city to travel overseas, and he wants high schooler Miles to serve as Spider-Man while he's away. Xbox, PS5 or Switch?:How to pick the right video game console If you're new to Miles Morales as Spidey, a quick explainer: He's got all the abilities of Parker's version but also boasts bioelectric powers and the ability to turn invisible to evade threats.

While I haven't found the time to share it with my readers so far, you can probably count me amongst the list of serious gamers who spend a considerable part of their daily time lodged in front of a computer playing high configuration video games from some of the best developers. Since I don't ownany of the two major consoles, most of the gaming I do is on my high-end gaming PC, which I have proudly assembled part-by-part in order to deliver an awesome gaming experience. While I do like playing games a lot, you will find that no matter how hyped a video game may be, it has a really hard time getting my attention and keeping it. One of the reasons behind this is that I can hardly spend over 24 hours lodged in front of a single game, no matter how great it is. I constantly search for variety.

We present a recommender system intended to be used by a community of gamers. The system uses free-form text reviews of games written by the members of the community, along with information about the games that a particular user likes, in order to recommend new games that are likely to be of interest to that user. The system uses the frequency of co-occurrence of word pairs that appear in the reviews of a game as features that represent the game. The pairs consist of adjectives and context words; i.e., words that appear close to an adjective in a review. Because of the extremely large number of possible combinations of adjectives and context words, we use information-theoretic co-clustering of the adjective-context word pairs to reduce the dimensionality. Games are represented using the standard information retrieval vector space model, in which vector features are based on the frequency of occurrence of cocluster pairs.We present the results of three experiments with our system. In the first experiment, we use a variety of strategies to relate frequencies of co-cluster pairs to vector features, to see which produces the most accurate recommendations. In the second, we explore the effects of co-cluster dimensionality on the quality of our system’s recommendations. In the third experiment, we compare our approach to a baseline approach using a bag-of-words technique and conclude that our approach produces higher quality recommendations.