Short paper accepted on RecSys 2025!

Alina presented our paper Evaluating the contextual integrity of false positives in algorithmic travel surveillance at FAccT 2025.

Long paper accepted to FAccT 2025!

Denis presented our paper Paths and recreation: Inclusive recommendation of physical activities in your neighbourhood at CHIIR 2025.

Dorota attended the (invitation only) 4th Strategic Workshop on Information Retrieval at Lorne (SWIRL).

Demo paper accepted to CHIIR 2025!

Our paper Unexplored frontiers: A review of empirical studies of exploratory search was published in SIGIR Forum.

Yang presented our paper On the Negative Perception of Cross-domain Recommendations and Explanations at SIGIR 2024.

Alan (remotely) presented our papers Behind the scenes: Adapting cinematography and editing concepts to navigation in virtual reality and Read the Fine Print: Assessing the User Experience of Reading in High Resolution Virtual Reality at CHI 2024.

Long paper accepted to SIGIR 2024!

Yang presented our paper Sample, nudge and rank: Exploiting interpretable GAN controls for exploratory search at IUI 2024.

Denis presented our paper The Dark Matter of Serendipity in Recommender Systems at CHIIR 2024.

Late breaking work paper accepted to CHI 2024!

Long paper (conditionally) accepted to CHI 2024!

Yang received the Researcher of the Year award from the Department of Computer Science. Congratulations!

Long paper accepted to IUI 2024!

Long paper accepted to CHIIR 2024!

Business Finland have agreed to fund our project “Untangling People Flow for Smart and Sustainable Urban Environments”. Consortium partners include: University of Helsinki, University of Oulu, University of Lapland, VTT, Kone, Elisa, Finavia, Haltian, Workspace, Granlund and City of Helsinki.

Yang presented our papers What We Evaluate When We Evaluate Recommender Systems: Understanding Recommender Systems’ Performance using Item Response Theory and On the Consistency, Discriminative Power and Robustness of Sampled Metrics in Offline Top-n Recommender System Evaluation at RecSys 2023.

Late breaking results paper accepted to RecSys 2023!

Long paper accepted to RecSys 2023!

Mari Lehtikari has joined the group as a summer trainee!

Denis presented our paper Rethinking Serendipity in Recommender Systems at CHIIR 2023.

Ivan Kropotov has joined the group as a software designer!

We have received funding from Business Finland for the R2B project “CoCreation Radar” with colleagues from The Centre for Consumer Research, University of Helsinki.

Short paper accepted to CHIIR 2023!

Yang was awarded a NOKIA scholarship. Congratulations!

Colm O Fearghail has joined the group as an Academy of Finland funded post-doctoral researcher!

Yang presented our paper ROGUE: A System for Exploratory Search of GANs at SIGIR 2022.

Alan presented our paper Critiquing-based Modeling of Subjective Preferences at UMAP 2022.

Yang’s paper on Lexical Ambiguity Detection in Professional Discourse was accepted to Information Processing & Management.

Denis presented our paper Rating Consistency is Consistently Underrated: An Exploratory Analysis of Movie-Tag Rating Inconsistency at SAC 2022.

Long paper accepted to UMAP 2022!

Demo paper accepted to SIGIR 2022!

Denis presented The Tag Genome Dataset for Books at CHIIR 2022 in Regensburg, Germany.

Alan and Dorota’s review article Game Over? A Review of Gamification in Information Retrieval is now availble online on the SIGIR Forum website.

Long paper accepted to the Recommender Systems track at SAC 2022!

Resources paper accepted at CHIIR 2022!

Yang presented our paper Statistically Significant Detection of Semantic Shifts using Contextual Word Embeddings at Eval4NLP, co-located with EMNLP 2021.

Ivan presented our paper on Exploratory Search of GANs with Contextual Bandits at CIKM 2021.

Paper accepted at Eval4NLP workshop!

Dorota was a panelist in the discussion of AI education in the Nordic region at NordicAIMeet (photo).

Yang presented our work on semantic shift detection at Nordic AI meet (selected for oral presentation, photo).

Short paper accepted at CIKM 2021!

Yang presented our paper Can Language Models Identify Wikipedia Articles with Readability and Style Issues? at ICTIR 2021.

Congratulations to Jiayue Xue for completing his MSc!

Paper accepted at ICTIR 2021!

Dorota was a co-organiser of RL4HCI: Reinforcement Learning for Humans, Computers, and Interaction Workshop, co-located with CHI 2021.

A big thank you to everyone who submitted papers, reviewed and helped with the organisation of the Fourth edition of the Workshop on Exploratory Search and Interactive Data Analytics (ESIDA)  co-located with IUI 2021.

Alan presented our paper Query Suggestions as Summarizations in Exploratory Search at CHIIR 2021.

Denis Kotkov has joined the group as an FCAI funded post-doctoral researcher!

We had a long paper accepted at CHIIR 2021, based on work by Jing Li during her MSc thesis. Well done!

Congratulations to Yu An for completing her MSc!

Congratulations to Jaana Louhio for completing her MSc!

Please submit your articles to our IUI 2021 workshop on Exploratory Search and Interactive Data Analytics, virtual! Please see the call for papers on the ESIDA website for details.

Andrea and Dorota gave a tutorial on Bandit Algorithms in Recommender Systems at RecSys 2020.

We have received funding from Business Finland and M-Brain for a 1 year project entitled “Summarizing Search Results with Dynamic Exploratory Search Captions”.

Congratulations to Jing Li and Ivan Kropotov for completing their MSc degrees!

Congratulations to Dr Arlene Casey for obtaining her PhD degree with her thesis entitled: LitCrit: Explorating Intentions as a basis for Automated Feedback on Related Work.

Welcome to Daniel Koch who has joined the group as a summer intern!

Yang Liu has re-joined the group as a PhD student!

Welcome to Ivan Kropotov who has joined the group as a summer intern!

Congratulations to Yang Liu for completing her MSc!

Invited paper on user behaviour and search engine adaptation in exploratory search published in ACM SIGWEB newsletter.

Alan and Dorota were invited to give a seminar talk called Manuscripts and newspapers: Using machine learning to map the sciences and identify political bias at Language Technology, University of Helsinki.

Andrea Barraza from the Insight Centre for Data Analytics, National University of Ireland, Galway is visiting ESP group from 24/11-08/12.

Dorota gave a talk called Bandit algorithms in information retrieval and recommender systems at the Nokia AI seminar.

Dorota was invited to give an invited talk entitled Don’t search, explore: supporting scientific literature exploration for the 90th anniversary of the Finnish research library association.

Alan and Dorota were invited to give a seminar talk called Discovering new patterns in scientific literature and news data at the Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities (HELDIG) pizza seminar.

Dorota gave a tutorial on Bandit Algorithms in Recommender Systems at RecSys 2019 in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Arlene presented A Framework for Annotating ‘Related Works’ to Support Feedback to Novice Writers at LAW13 in Florence, Italy.

Arlene presented Can Models of Author Intention Support Quality Assessment of Content? at BIRNDL in Paris, France.

Paper accepted at RANLP 2019 (Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, 2019)!

We have received funding from Business Finland and M-Brain for a 1 year project entitled “Reinforcement learning and alternative truth discovery in augmented media analysis”.

Welcome to Yang Liu who has joined the group as a summer intern!

Paper accepted at BIRNDL 2019 (4th Joint Workshop on Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing for Digital Libraries)!

We are looking to hire a PhD student to work on interactive information retrieval, user modelling and human-computer interaction! Ideal starting date is Summer/Autumn 2019. We have yet to send out an official advertisement, but if you are interested, please send an up-to-date CV together with a description of your research interests to Dorota.

UPDATE: the official advert is now available online here.

Welcome to Jing Li and Yu An who have joined the group as summer interns!

Dorota’s book, Bandit Algorithms in Information Retrieval, has just been released!

Paper accepted at LAW13 (13th Linguistic Annotation Workshop, 2019)!

A big thank you to everyone who submitted papers, reviewed and helped with the organisation of the Workshop on Exploratory Search and Interactive Data Analytics (ESIDA) hosted at IUI 2019.

Alan presented How Relevance Feedback is Framed Affects User Experience, but not Behaviour and Arlene (pictured) presented Holes in the Outline: Subject-dependent Abstract Quality and its Implications for Scientific Literature Search at CHIIR 2019 in Glasgow, Scotland.

We are looking to hire summer interns for several human-computer interaction, information retrieval and machine learning projects! See here for project descriptions. If you are interested or would like more information about a specific project, please email either Dorota or Alan. All internship positions have been filled. Thank you for your interest!

The group has moved back to the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki. Moi moi Edinburgh!

Two papers accepted at CHIIR 2019, based on work by Chien-yu Huang and Dhruv Tripathi during their MSc projects. Well done!

Please submit your articles to our IUI 2019 workshop on Exploratory Search and Interactive Data Analytics in Los Angeles, USA! Please see the call for papers on the ESIDA website for details.

Dorota presented our paper How consistent is relevance feedback in exploratory search? at CIKM 2018 in Torino, Italy.

Congratulations to Ioannis Gkiliris, Chien-yu Huang, Dhruv Tripathi and Peiyu Zhang for submitting their MSc dissertations. Good luck for the future!

Paper accepted at CIKM 2018!

Congratulations to Dr Joel Pyykkö for successfully defending his PhD in Online Personalization in Exploratory Search. For more details see the announcement here.

A big thank you to everyone who submitted papers, reviewed and helped with the organisation of the Workshop on Exploratory Search and Interactive Data Analytics (ESIDA) hosted at IUI 2018.

Arlene Casey has joined our group as a PhD student working on NLP.

Please submit your articles to our IUI 2018 workshop on Exploratory Search and Interactive Data Analytics in Tokyo, Japan! Please see the call for papers on the ESIDA website for details.

Alan gave a seminar at EMBL-EBI giving an overview of our work on reinforcement learning and user modelling in exploratory search. The slides are available online here.

Dorota gave a tutorial on Bandit Algorithms in Interactive Information Retrieval at ICTIR 2017 in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Joel presented his paper Dynamic exploratory search in content-based image retrieval at SCIA 2017 in Tromsø, Norway.

The group has moved to the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. We will miss you Helsinki!

Dorota presented our paper Towards fine-grained adaptation of exploration/exploitation in information retrieval at IUI 2017 in Limassol, Cyprus.

A big thank you to everyone who submitted papers, reviewed and helped with the organisation of the Workshop on Exploratory Search and Interactive Data Analytics (ESIDA) hosted at IUI 2017.

Dorota presented our paper Using topic models to assess document relevance in exploratory search user studies at CHIIR 2017 in Oslo, Norway.