Dr. Mounia Lalmas
16th April 2024, 11:00am - 12:00pm (GST)
| Title: | AI for Search and Recommendations – Examples from Spotify |
| Venue: | TII Yas Auditorium |
| Affiliation: | Spotify |
| Abstract: | This talk will describe the role that search and recommendation play in improving the Spotify experience. Serving as the entry point to Spotify's extensive audio catalog, search and recommendation not only allow users to quickly find specific music tracks, podcasts or audiobooks, but also encourage the exploration and discovery of new content. This requires a deeper understanding of representation learning for both content and user, and more recently, AI to meet the sophisticated demands of audio listening. This presentation is based on the collective research and publications of numerous contributors at Spotify. |
| Bio: | Mounia Lalmas is a Senior Director of Research at Spotify, and the Head of Tech Research in Personalisation, where she leads an interdisciplinary team of research scientists, working on personalization. Mounia also holds an honorary professorship at University College London. She also holds an additional appointment as a Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam. Before that, she was a Director of Research at Yahoo, where she led a team of researchers working on advertising quality. She also worked with various teams at Yahoo on topics related to user engagement in the context of news, search, and user-generated content. Prior to this, she held a Microsoft Research/RAEng Research Chair at the School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow. Before that, she was Professor of Information Retrieval at the Department of Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London. She is regularly a senior programme committee member at conferences such as WSDM, KDD, WWW and SIGIR. She was programme co-chair for SIGIR 2015, WWW 2018 and WSDM 2020, and CIKM 2023. |