Blendle Research

“Did I miss something?”: A complete and personal news selection

Challenge of finding quality news
In this workshop, we take on the challenges of filter bubbles and recommendation bias. A balanced, diverse, and relevant selection of news clearly helps with discovering quality journalism. With data from Blendle, two recommender system experts from industry and academia, and the participants, we will develop a better way of finding news. One that doesn’t reward fake news, filter bubbles and an endless stream of cat videos.
We will provide participants with the curated selection made by Blendle’s editorial team (a daily selection is available for several years) with metadata and enrichments for the original content. As Blendle does not own the copyright of the original content from publisher, we cannot release this, but we can make this available under an NDA during the workshop. This will allow participants to start working on the research challenges as soon as they join.

About you…
We are looking for PhDs and Postdocs with a wide range of skills, from data mining and visualization aimed at finding patterns for what a complete news selection looks like, to algorithm and machine learning skills to operationalize an approach for generating a complete selection. Together we will work on answering the following questions:

• How to select a balanced and diverse selection of items using mixed initiative approaches (e.g., editorial team + content enrichment + machine learning).
• How to best present a diverse selection of items (how to mix editorial and algorithmically recommended content, e.g., as a sequence or top-N set).
• Which information should be used to accompany these diverse items (e.g., textual or visual explanations), to help address users’ concerns that they might be missing something.

When and where?
The workshop and accommodation in Leiden is provide free of charge, and
takes place at the Lorentz International center for scientific workshops, 27th of Nov. – 1st of Dec. 2017. The workshop webpage has more more information and a registration form.