{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Recsperts - Recommender Systems Experts","title":"#33: Useful Recommender Systems and 20 Years of RecSys with Joseph Konstan","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":5077,"description":"In episode 33 of Recsperts, I speak with Joseph A. Konstan, Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Distinguished University Teaching Professor at the University of Minnesota, co-founder of GroupLens, and the very first General Chair of the ACM RecSys conference back in 2007. This year he returns in that role as General Co-Chair of the 20th RecSys in Minneapolis. We talk about what actually makes a recommendation useful, why the field is more than a machine learning application, and how the community around RecSys came into being.\nWe start with what Joe cares about most: usefulness. He recalls the supermarket thought experiment of printing \"buy bananas and bread\" on every shopping cart and explains why the early systems were valuable because they were wrong a lot. A recommender that took ten people like you and often got it wrong was also often surprising when it got it right, whereas today's systems are wrong far less and useless far more. As Joe puts it, \"I don't care about prediction at all. I care about changing people's behavior.\" We discuss why optimizing for click-through in news reliably produces clickbait, why leave-one-out evaluation only makes sense if you assume the user already knew the right answer and had simply forgotten it, and why usefulness can never be read off a single metric but depends on the task, the context and the breadth of the user's intent. Sometimes the most useful thing is not the recommendation itself, but the stars, the reviews or the comparison table you put around it.\nFrom there we turn to the community itself. Joe traces it back to the spring of 1996 and the Berkeley Collaborative Filtering Workshop organized by Hal Varian and Paul Resnick, through a decade of scattered workshops at SIGIR, CSCW and CHI, to the first RecSys in 2007: a room on the Minnesota campus, over 120 people, and a substantial delegation from industry including Amazon. We discuss why the conference has always been heavily international and always...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/5aEuXaIPxTFiKrepOVeTtB4JSWf3YlVUbAQdiV2LNzA/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9zaG93/LzI0Mzc3LzE2MzIz/NDExMjMtYXJ0d29y/ay5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}