Data Skeptic29 Okt 2025

Music Playlist Recommendations

In this episode, Rebecca Salganik, a PhD student at the University of Rochester with a background in vocal performance and composition, discusses her research on fairness in music recommendation systems. She explores three key types of fairness—group, individual, and counterfactual—and examines how algorithms create challenges like popularity bias (favoring mainstream content) and multi-interest bias (underserving users with diverse tastes). Rebecca introduces LARP, her multi-stage multimodal framework for playlist continuation that uses contrastive learning to align text and audio representations, learn song relationships, and create playlist-level embeddings to address the cold start problem.

A significant contribution of Rebecca's work is the Music Semantics dataset, created by scraping Reddit discussions to capture how people naturally describe music using atmospheric qualities, contextual comparisons, and situational associations rather than just technical features. This dataset, available on Hugging Face, enables more nuanced recommendation systems that better understand user preferences and support niche tastes. Her research utilizes industry datasets including Last.fm and Spotify's Million Playlist Dataset, and points toward exciting future applications in music generation and multimodal systems that combine audio, text, and video.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(601)

Survey Design Working Session

Susan Gerbic joins Kyle to review some of the surveys Data Skeptic has launch, draft a new survey about podcast listening habits, and then review the results of that survey. You can see those results ...

14 Mar 20231h 1min

Bot Detection and Dyadic Surveys

The use of social bots to fill out online surveys is becoming prevalent. Today, we speak with Sara Bybee, a postdoctoral research scholar at the University of Utah. Sara shares from her research, how ...

6 Mar 202335min

Reproducible ESP Testing

Our guest today is Zoltán Kekecs, a Ph.D. holder in Behavioural Science. Zoltán highlights the problem of low replicability in journal papers and illustrates how researchers can better ensure complete...

20 Feb 202347min

A Survey of Data Science Methodologies

On the show, Iñigo Martinez, a Ph.D. student at the University of Navarra shares his survey results which investigated how data practitioners perform data science projects. He revealed the methodologi...

13 Feb 202324min

Opinion Dynamics Models

On the show today, Dino Carpentras, a post-doctoral researcher at the Computational Social Science group at ETH Zürich joins us to discuss how opinion dynamics models are built and validated. He expla...

6 Feb 202335min

Casual Affective Triggers

Crafting survey questions is one thing but getting your audience to fill it is yet another. On the show today, we speak with Alexander Nolte, an Associate Professor at the University of Tartu. Alexand...

30 Jan 202335min

Conversational Surveys

Traditional surveys have straight-jacket questions to be answered, thus restricting the information that can be gotten. Today, Ziang Xiao, a Postdoc Researcher in the FATE group at Microsoft Research ...

23 Jan 202339min

Do Results Generalize for Privacy and Security Surveys

Today, Jenny Tang, a Ph.D. student of societal computing at Carnegie Mellon University discusses her work on the generalization of privacy and security surveys on platforms such as Amazon MTurk and Pr...

17 Jan 202340min