Dmitri Goldenberg
Personalization is one of the key applications in machine learning with widespread usage across e-commerce, entertainment, pro- duction, healthcare and many other industries. While various ma- chine learning techniques present novel state-of-the-art advances and super-human performance year-over-year, personalization and recommender-systems applications are often late-adopters of novel solutions due to problem hardness and implementation complexity. This tutorial presents recent advances across the personaliza- tion industry and demonstrates their practical applications in real case-studies of world-leading online platforms. Key trends such as deep learning, causality and active exploration with bandits are depicted with real examples and demonstrated alongside their busi- ness considerations and implementation challenges. Rising topics like explainability, fairness, natural interfaces and content gener- ation are covered, touching on aspects of both technology and user experience. Our tutorial relies on recent advances in the field and on work conducted at Booking.com, where we implement per- sonalization models on one of the world’s leading online travel platform. CCS CONCEPTS • Information systems →Personalization; Recommender sys- tems.