Invited Lecture, Dr. Ioannis Partalas, Principal Machine Learning Scientist, Expedia Group

On Thursday, May 19, at 16:30, our MSc programme will have the pleasure and honor of hosting online Dr. Ioannis Partalas, Principal Machine Learning Scientist at Expedia Group, who will give an invited lecture on “Learning Representations for Hotel Ranking”.

Zoom link: https://authgr.zoom.us/j/97651996709?pwd=ZWkyckhqWDd4dnpqOGYvdG5WTnU0dz09

Abstract: In this talk I will present work on learning item representations from user click-sessions in the hospitality domain and more specifically from the Expedia Group online platforms. I will present in details the proposed neural architecture that leverages side information of items, like attributes and geographic information, in order to learn a joint embedding. I will also explain how it addresses the cold-start problem which is typical in recommendation systems. Results in a downstream task show that including such structured information improves predictive performance. Finally, I will show through the results of on-line controlled tests that the model generates high quality representations that boosts the performance of a hotel recommendation system on Expedia travel platform.

Bio: Ioannis Partalas works as Principal Machine Learning Scientist at Expedia Group. His current focus is learning representation in the context of recommendation and ranking systems. Previously he worked as a Research Scientist in Viseo Group, France, on Natural Language Processing building scalable approaches for various tasks such as text classification, named-entity recognition and opinion mining. Before that he was an associate researcher in Grenoble-Alpes University working on large-scale/extreme classification systems.