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With ever-increasing amounts of online information available, modeling and predicting individual preferences-for books or articles, for example-is becoming more and more important. Good predictions enable us to improve advice to users, and…
Personalized search is a problem where models benefit from learning user preferences from per-user historical interaction data. The inferred preferences enable personalized ranking models to improve the relevance of documents for users.…
Automated scoring of student responses to open-ended questions, including short-answer questions, has great potential to scale to a large number of responses. Recent approaches for automated scoring rely on supervised learning, i.e.,…
In this paper, we study stochastic coupon probing problem in social networks. Assume there is a social network and a set of coupons. We can offer coupons to some users adaptively and those users who accept the offer will act as seeds and…
This survey is focused on certain sequential decision-making problems that involve optimizing over probability functions. We discuss the relevance of these problems for learning and control. The survey is organized around a framework that…
Conventional methods for query autocompletion aim to predict which completed query a user will select from a list. A shortcoming of this approach is that users often do not know which query will provide the best retrieval performance on the…
Randomized rounding is a technique that was originally used to approximate hard offline discrete optimization problems from a mathematical programming relaxation. Since then it has also been used to approximately solve sequential stochastic…
We consider the revenue maximization problem for an online retailer who plans to display in order a set of products differing in their prices and qualities. Consumers have attention spans, i.e., the maximum number of products they are…
Motivated by applications in online advertising, we consider a class of maximization problems where the objective is a function of the sequence of actions as well as the running duration of each action. For these problems, we introduce the…
Capturing users' precise preferences is a fundamental problem in large-scale recommender system. Currently, item-based Collaborative Filtering (CF) methods are common matching approaches in industry. However, they are not effective to model…
One goal of online social recommendation systems is to harness the wisdom of crowds in order to identify high quality content. Yet the sequential voting mechanisms that are commonly used by these systems are at odds with existing…
Online surveys have the potential to support adaptive questions, where later questions depend on earlier responses. Past work has taken a rule-based approach, uniformly across all respondents. We envision a richer interpretation of adaptive…
CMO Council reports that 71\% of internet users in the U.S. were influenced by coupons and discounts when making their purchase decisions. It has also been shown that offering coupons to a small fraction of users (called seed users) may…
We consider an online model for recommendation systems, with each user being recommended an item at each time-step and providing 'like' or 'dislike' feedback. A latent variable model specifies the user preferences: both users and items are…
Personality is a psychological factor that reflects people's preferences, which in turn influences their decision-making. We hypothesize that accurate modeling of users' personalities improves recommendation systems' performance. However,…
Recently, it has become evident that submodularity naturally captures widely occurring concepts in machine learning, signal processing and computer vision. Consequently, there is need for efficient optimization procedures for submodular…
Public opinion polling is usually done by random sampling from the entire population, treating individual opinions as independent. In the real world, individuals' opinions are often correlated, e.g., among friends in a social network. In…
Sequential recommendation task aims to predict user preference over items in the future given user historical behaviors. The order of user behaviors implies that there are resourceful sequential patterns embedded in the behavior history…
Crowd-sourcing deals with solving problems by assigning them to a large number of non-experts called crowd using their spare time. In these systems, the final answer to the question is determined by summing up the votes obtained from the…
Automated next-best action recommendation for each customer in a sequential, dynamic and interactive context has been widely needed in natural, social and business decision-making. Personalized next-best action recommendation must involve…