Preferred.AI

In early August 2018, Aghiles attended the international conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), which took place in Monterey, California. Hereafter, he shares his UAI experience.

The conference was hosted in the InterContinental Hotel, and according to the organizers, this was the biggest UAI ever. The papers presented in the conference covered various current areas in machine learning and AI. Among the topics most represented were: Representation Learning (where our contribution falls into), Causal Inference, Variational Inference, Gaussian Process, Online and Reinforcement Learning.

Each accepted paper was presented as either an oral and/or poster. For the oral presentations, there was only one session at time, which was quite convenient as one could attend any talk of interest. I particularly enjoyed the daily poster sessions; they were highly attended and allowed for deep and enriching discussions/exchanges.

Our work accepted to UAI is entitled “Probabilistic Collaborative Representation Learning for Personalized Item Recommendation” and describes a new Bayesian model for jointly modeling user preferences and deep item  features learning from auxiliary information (such as items’ textual descriptions, images, contexts, etc.).

The conference would not have been a full experience without its banquet dinner at the beautiful Monterey Marina Bay Aquarium. It was another opportunity to meet and interact with people in a broader sense. I particularly retain two things from this evening. The first one, of course, is the excellent food :). The second one, is a discussion with a group of researchers working on causal inference, which allowed me to realized the importance to look into this huge underexplored field in Machine Learning.

UAI’18 was also an opportunity to discover Monterey. Aside from a long and rich history, the things that I enjoyed most about Monterey were the cool-summer weather, fresh & delicious seafood, and all these defunct sardine-canning factories turned into bars, restaurants or shops.

In July 2018, Hady traveled to Stockholm, Sweden for the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI).  Here, he recounts his experience from the trip.

IJCAI-18 was probably the largest academic conference I ever participated in so far, with 2500 registered attendees.  This was 20% larger than the 2017 conference.  This pronounced growth and outsized congregation is one more sign of the rise (the return?) of Artificial Intelligence or AI.

The conference organizer knew how to put up a show.  The scene-stealer during the opening ceremony was definitely the dancing couple of human and robot, gyrating harmoniously to the catchy beat.  Talk about what AI can do!

Our Preferred.AI group has 2 papers accepted to the conference.  Both were presented in the Learning Preferences or Rankings session.  The first paper “Modeling Contemporaneous Basket Sequences with Twin Networks for Next-Item Recommendation” by Trong, Hady, and Yuan explores the interaction between two behavioral streams that are occurring concurrently, such as clicking and purchasing on an e-commerce site, and how they can be modeled jointly to improve sequential recommendation.

The second paper “A Bayesian Latent Variable Model of User Preferences with Item Context” by Aghiles and Hady describes a novel graphical model based on Poisson factorization that incorporates item context information, such as which items are viewed together, in addition to  user-item interactions, to improve recommendations especially for users with more limited information.

In addition to the oral presentations in the session, we also got a chance to engage the audience in a poster session.  This allowed deep dives into specific issues, which would take more time and one-on-one discussions.  For instance, from a discussion with a researcher from a large online retailer, I learnt about how prevalent recurrent neural networks were in the company’s sequential recommendation models.

The two things that surprised me the most about Stockholm were the weather and the water.  While it was summer then, I was still struck by how a place so far north could be so warm.  No wonder the humidity is high, because water is everywhere!  I grew up with the notion that the neighboring  Indonesia was the largest archipelagic nation.  While that is probably still true in terms of area, little would I expect that the Stockholm archipelago actually have an even greater count of islands than Indonesia.

Prior to the trip, the thing I associated the most with Sweden was the Nobel Prize.  So a visit to Stockholm would not have been complete without experiencing the Nobel Museum.  While the museum has many artefacts connected to various prize winners over the years, the greatest find in my exploration was the cafe!  Some of the chairs have been signed by past prize winners. Well, I may not yet be able to say that I have stepped into their shoes, but now I could say that I once sat on their chairs :).