Humans and Recommender Systems: Towards a Mutual Understanding

Pre-Doc (30 hours/week for 3 years) - starting earliest September 2021 - research areas: personality, music & emotion

The position is part of the Austrian FWF-project "Humans and Recommender Systems: Towards a Mutual Understanding", an interdisciplinary project on music recommender systems (RS) in close cooperation with the Department for Computer Science at the University of Innsbruck (Austria), as well as the Johannes Kepler University Linz (Austria) and the Technical University of Vienna (Austria). In general, the project focusses on enhancing the understanding of user intent, specifically the motivation why people listen to music in a specific situational context. Moreover, we aim to advance the users’ understanding for the decisions that lead to the recommendation of certain tracks. The resulting increased mutual understanding and communication between the users of RS and the system itself can contribute to improved user models and recommendation performance. This work is complementary to existing RS research that mostly focus on technical aspects such as content features and collaborative filtering techniques.

This PhD position will deal in particular with devising models for explanation of sequential recommendations and incorporating relevance feedback, as well as researching consistency of theories (e.g., influence of personality, intent, etc. on music listening behavior). You will be part of the Personality, Emotion and Music Laboratory of the Department of Psychology at the University of Innsburck, headed by Prof. Marcel Zentner.

Please see here for more information: https://www.uibk.ac.at/psychologie/fachbereiche/pdd/vacancies