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Episodes from Data Skeptic
News Recommendations
News recommendation algorithms influence far more than what stories we click—they can shape our understanding of the world. In this episode, Kyle Polich speaks with Andreea Iana about responsible AI, filter bubbles, multilingual news recommendation, and her open-source NewsRecLib framework for…
Give Users the Wheel
What if you could simply tell a recommendation system what you want instead of relying on likes, dislikes, and watch history? Kyle Polich talks with Fuyuan Lyu about the DPR framework, which combines large language models and traditional recommender systems to give users direct control over…
AutoLike
How can researchers audit recommendation systems when the algorithms are hidden from view? Hieu Le joins Kyle Polich to discuss Auto-Like, a reinforcement learning framework that systematically explores how platforms like TikTok personalize content feeds. The conversation covers recommendation…
Student Spotlight: Aaron Payne, Data Analyst
Aaron Payne, an MBA student at Georgia Tech studying business analytics and a Senior Insights Analyst at Chick-fil-A, joins Kyle Polich to talk about turning analytics into decisions that matter. They unpack a real-world forecasting project with Comfama in Colombia, including messy data realities,…
The Future is Agentic in Recommender Systems
Kyle Polich sits down with Yashar Deldjoo, research scientist and Associate Professor at the Polytechnic University of Bari, to explore how recommender systems have evolved and why trustworthiness matters. They unpack key dimensions of responsible AI, including robustness to adversarial attacks,…
Book Ratings and Recommendations
Goodreads star ratings can be misleading as measures of "book quality," and research from Hannes Rosenbusch suggests that for many professionally published books, differences between readers often matter more than differences between books. The episode also explores how to model reader preferences,…
Disentanglement and Interpretability in Recommender Systems
Ervin Dervishaj, a PhD student at the University of Copenhagen, discusses his research on disentangled representation learning in recommender systems, finding that while disentanglement strongly correlates with interpretability, it doesn't consistently improve recommendation performance. The…
Collective Altruism in Recommender Systems
Ekaterina (Kat) Fedorova from MIT EECS joins us to discuss strategic learning in recommender systems—what happens when users collectively coordinate to game recommendation algorithms. Kat's research reveals surprising findings: algorithmic "protest movements" can paradoxically help platforms by…
Niche vs Mainstream
Anas Buhayh discusses multi-stakeholder fairness in recommender systems and the S'mores framework—a simulation allowing users to choose between mainstream and niche algorithms. His research shows specialized recommenders improve utility for niche users while raising questions about filter bubbles…
Healthy Friction in Job Recommender Systems
In this episode, host Kyle Polich speaks with Roan Schellingerhout, a fourth-year PhD student at Maastricht University, about explainable multi-stakeholder recommender systems for job recruitment. Roan discusses his research on creating AI-powered job matching systems that balance the needs of…
Fairness in PCA-Based Recommenders
In this episode, we explore the fascinating world of recommender systems and algorithmic fairness with David Liu, Assistant Research Professor at Cornell University's Center for Data Science for Enterprise and Society. David shares insights from his research on how machine learning models can…
Video Recommendations in Industry
In this episode, Kyle Polich sits down with Cory Zechmann, a content curator working in streaming television with 16 years of experience running the music blog "Silence Nogood." They explore the intersection of human curation and machine learning in content discovery, discussing the concept of…