Our annual half-day analytics and conversion conference is now under 2 weeks away! We’re incredibly excited about our programme and speaker lineup for 2019.

With that in mind, we’ll be building up to the event with a series of in-depth interviews with the industry experts who will be joining us to deliver the conference. So far, we’ve heard from CX Consultant, Alan Colville, and Conversational Commerce expert, Lauren Hale, about their respective topics for the day.

In this, our final interview in the series, we’ll hear from Lecturer in Data Science and AI, and Turing Fellow, Iván Palomares Carrascosa. Below, he explains more about Recommender Systems, true personalisation and what we can expect on the horizon.

If the below whets your appetite for finding out more about Recommender Systems and personalisation, Iván will be giving a talk at our analytics and conversion conference on 27th June.

1. In not too many words, please tell us what you do…

I am a Lecturer in Data Science and AI with the University of Bristol, and also a Turing Fellow at the UK’s Alan Turing Institute. Last year I founded my own research lab at Bristol, called ‘Decision Support and Recommender Systems’ Lab.

2. Can you give us a brief introduction to Recommender Systems?

They are a broad family of personalised decision-making tools, originally created to help users, consumers etc... with the information overload problem on the Internet, by analysing their preferences, behaviour and needs and providing them with personalised recommendations on what product to buy, which place to visit, which movie to play, etc...

3. What Recommender Systems do we encounter in our everyday lives?

Some good examples of portals and apps providing end users with recommender services include; eCommerce portals like Amazon, eBay; entertainment portals such as Netflix and Spotify; and, tourist portals like Booking.com, Tripadvisor.

4. Is true personalisation - as opposed to advanced segmentation - on the horizon?

It largely depends on the level of granularity to which we analyse and extract useful knowledge from users’ data (or the level of granularity to which we can segment a body of users).

True personalisation is ultimately about the specific end user - or in some cases a specific group of users in group recommender approaches. Leading experts and industry firms worldwide are achieving this level of personalisation at present.

On the contrary, segmentation is, as far as I understand it, about a segment or specific class of users. The more fine-grained and specific these segments are, the more they would emulate true personalisation.

5. What’s next for Recommender Systems? Will we see any new applications soon?

I hope to see how Recommender Systems reach out to new or scarcely unexplored areas where personalisation might be beneficial to support our decisions: choosing what higher education degree to study, which exercise workout or meals to have tomorrow, which citizens’ proposal to take into consideration in the next city council’s planning meeting, etc...

I would also be excited to see innovative personalisation apps for groups of tourists, friends, etc... Who hasn’t been on a group or family trip where conflicts or indecision arose on what places to visit?

If the below whets your appetite for finding out more about Recommender Systems and personalisation, Iván will be giving a talk at our analytics and conversion conference on 27th June.