In episode 21 of Recsperts, we welcome Martijn Willemsen, Associate Professor at the Jheronimus Academy of Data Science and Eindhoven University of Technology. Martijn's researches on interactive recommender systems which includes aspects of decision psychology and user-centric evaluation. We discuss how users gain control over recommendations, how to support their goals and needs as well as how the user-centric evaluation framework fits into all of this.

In our interview, Martijn outlines the reasons for providing users control over recommendations and how to holistically evaluate the satisfaction and usefulness of recommendations for users goals and needs. We discuss the psychology of decision making with respect to how well or not recommender systems support it. We also dive into music recommender systems and discuss how nudging users to explore new genres can work as well as how longitudinal studies in recommender systems research can advance insights.

Towards the end of the episode, Martijn and I also discuss some examples and the usefulness of enabling users to provide negative explicit feedback to the system.

Enjoy this enriching episode of RECSPERTS - Recommender Systems Experts.
Don't forget to follow the podcast and please leave a review

(00:00) - Introduction
(03:03) - About Martijn Willemsen
(15:14) - Waves of User-Centric Evaluation in RecSys
(19:35) - Behaviorism is not Enough
(46:21) - User-Centric Evaluation Framework
(01:05:38) - Genre Exploration and Longitudinal Studies in Music RecSys
(01:20:59) - User Control and Negative Explicit Feedback
(01:31:50) - Closing Remarks

Links from the Episode:

Papers:

General Links:

WAP: The Science of Arousal