We are happy to announce that starting Masoud Mansoury is joing the Discovery Lab from July 2021 onwards. He will be working on Reinforcement learning over structured multi-modal information & Bias in Recommendation

Prior to joining the Discovery Lab, Masoud obtained his PhD from the Technical University of Eindhoven, the Netherlands. During his PhD he worked intensively on recommender systems and in particular on discovery and reduction of bias.

In the lab he will work with multimodal information, and together with Herke van Hoof he will investigate its usage in a reinforcement setting. When providing recommendations, it is often possible to get some evaluation of that recommendation (‘was it useful?’) while counterfactual information is often not available (‘would another recommendation have been more useful?’). These circumstances can make it difficult to train models using regression or classification techniques. In the lab we investigate the use of reinforcement learning which can work with structured multi-modal information such as user context, knowledge graphs, or text as inputs. As a result the system generates structured recommendations, such as proposals for promising looking lab experiments.