AntRS: Recommending Lists through a Multi-Objective Ant Colony System

International audienceWhen people use recommender systems, they generally expect coherent lists of items. Depending on the application domain, it can be a playlist of songs they are likely to enjoy in their favorite online music service, a set of educational resources to acquire new competencies through an intelligent tutoring system, or a sequence of exhibits to discover from an adaptive mobile museum guide. To make these lists coherent from the users' perspective, recommendations must find the best compromise between multiple objectives (best possible precision, need for diversity and novelty). We propose to achieve that goal through a multi-agent recommender system, called AntRS. We evaluated our approach with a music dataset with about 500 users and more than 13,000 sessions. The experiments show that we obtain good results as regards to precision, novelty and coverage in comparison with typical state-of-the-art single and multi-objective algorithms

From Music to Museum: Applications of Multi-Objective Ant Colony Systems to Real World Problems

International audienceRecommender systems are a flourishing domain in computer science for almost 30 years now. This rising popularity follows closely the number of data collected all around the world. Each and every internet user produces a huge amount of content during his lifetime. Recommender systems proactively help users to navigate these pieces of information by gathering, and selecting the items to users' needs. In this paper, we discuss the possibility and interest of applying our Multi-Objective Ant Colony System called AntRS to recommend items in different application domains. In particular, we show how our model performs better than the state-of-the-art models with music dataset, and describe our work-in-progress with the museum of fine arts in Nancy (France). The motivation behind this change of application domain is the recommendation of progressive sequences rather than unordered lists of items

Leveraging Artificial Intelligence in Marketing for Social Good—An Ethical Perspective

Artificial intelligence (AI) is (re)shaping strategy, activities, interactions, and relationships in business and specifically in marketing. The drawback of the substantial opportunities AI systems and applications (will) provide in marketing are ethical controversies. Building on the literature on AI ethics, the authors systematically scrutinize the ethical challenges of deploying AI in marketing from a multi-stakeholder perspective. By revealing interdependencies and tensions between ethical principles, the authors shed light on the applicability of a purely principled, deontological approach to AI ethics in marketing. To reconcile some of these tensions and account for the AI-for-social-good perspective, the authors make suggestions of how AI in marketing can be leveraged to promote societal and environmental well-being

Collaborative-demographic hybrid for financial: product recommendation

Internship Report presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Data Science and Advanced AnalyticsDue to the increased availability of mature data mining and analysis technologies supporting CRM processes, several financial institutions are striving to leverage customer data and integrate insights regarding customer behaviour, needs, and preferences into their marketing approach. As decision support systems assisting marketing and commercial efforts, Recommender Systems applied to the financial domain have been gaining increased attention. This thesis studies a Collaborative- Demographic Hybrid Recommendation System, applied to the financial services sector, based on real data provided by a Portuguese private commercial bank. This work establishes a framework to support account managers’ advice on which financial product is most suitable for each of the bank’s corporate clients. The recommendation problem is further developed by conducting a performance comparison for both multi-output regression and multiclass classification prediction approaches. Experimental results indicate that multiclass architectures are better suited for the prediction task, outperforming alternative multi-output regression models on the evaluation metrics considered. Withal, multiclass Feed-Forward Neural Networks, combined with Recursive Feature Elimination, is identified as the topperforming algorithm, yielding a 10-fold cross-validated F1 Measure of 83.16%, and achieving corresponding values of Precision and Recall of 84.34%, and 85.29%, respectively. Overall, this study provides important contributions for positioning the bank’s commercial efforts around customers’ future requirements. By allowing for a better understanding of customers’ needs and preferences, the proposed Recommender allows for more personalized and targeted marketing contacts, leading to higher conversion rates, corporate profitability, and customer satisfaction and loyalty

Understanding and Improving Continuous Experimentation : From A/B Testing to Continuous Software Optimization

Controlled experiments (i.e. A/B tests) are used by many companies with user-intensive products to improve their software with user data. Some companies adopt an experiment-driven approach to software development with continuous experimentation (CE). With CE, every user-affecting software change is evaluated in an experiment and specialized roles seek out opportunities to experiment with functionality. The goal of the thesis is to describe current practice and support CE in industry. The main contributions are threefold. First, a review of the CE literature on: infrastructure and processes, the problem-solution pairs applied in industry practice, and the benefits and challenges of the practice. Second, a multi-case study with 12 companies to analyze how experimentation is used and why some companies fail to fully realize the benefits of CE. A theory for Factors Affecting Continuous Experimentation (FACE) is constructed to realize this goal. Finally, a toolkit called Constraint Oriented Multi-variate Bandit Optimization (COMBO) is developed for supporting automated experimentation with many variables simultaneously, live in a production environment.The research in the thesis is conducted under the design science paradigm using empirical research methods, with simulation experiments of tool proposals and a multi-case study on company usage of CE. Other research methods include systematic literature review and theory building.From FACE we derive three factors that explain CE utility: (1) investments in data infrastructure, (2) user problem complexity, and (3) incentive structures for experimentation. Guidelines are provided on how to strive towards state-of-the-art CE based on company factors. All three factors are relevant for companies wanting to use CE, in particular, for those companies wanting to apply algorithms such as those in COMBO to support personalization of software to users' context in a process of continuous optimization

Cognitive Load Reduction in Commanding Heterogeneous Robotic Teams

With the proliferation of multi-robot systems, the interfaces required to operate them have become increasingly complex compared to those used for single robot systems. This can present challenges for operators who need to extract relevant information in order to make informed decisions about how to operate the robots. To address this issue, this thesis explores a variety of strategies aimed at improving the intuitiveness and usability of such systems. These strategies encompass a range of approaches, from designing user interfaces to integrating physical input devices, knowledge representations, and other modalities to assist operators. In this context, the thesis proposes a decision support system that provides operators with additional information in an intuitive way, focusing specifically on handling a set of distinct commands for a heterogeneous robotic team. A key constraint during the development of this system was the lack of historical data available to train the modules on. As a result, the proposed system was tested in a few-shot environment and was specifically designed for this circumstance. The support system comprises two modules: one that probabilistically classifies the next command using a data mining approach called sequence prediction, which is used to reorder the available commands in the interface; and a second that creates higher-level commands by mining frequent sequences from the historical dataset. These command sequences are presented to the operator, who can add them as additional executable commands. To evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of this novel approach, a user study was conducted, which showed that both modules increased the efficiency and usability of the system, while also identifying opportunities for further improvement