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      <title-group>
        <article-title>Understanding user preferences and goals in recommender systems</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>Eindhoven University of Technology</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Eindhoven</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="NL">the Netherlands</country>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <abstract>
        <p />
      </abstract>
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      <p>
        Recommender systems typically use collaborative ltering: information from
your preferences (i.e. your ratings) is combined with that of other users to
predict what other items you might also like. Much of the research in the eld has
focused on building algorithms that provide recommendations based purely on
predicted accuracy [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
        ]. However, these models make strong assumptions about
how preferences come about, how stable they are, and how they can be
measured [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">4</xref>
        ]. Having a background in decision psychology I have studied how the
preference elicitation methods of recommender systems can be better
understood and improved based on psychological insights. I will illustrate this with an
example of new choice-based preference interfaces we have developed. Users are
more satis ed with a method that measures their preferences through a series of
choices than with a rating-based preference elicitation, because the rating-based
is more e ortful and provides more obscure movies [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ]. However, a drawback is
that recommendation lists of choice-based preference elicitation contain mostly
popular movies, and further research has investigated that showing trailers can
help to reduce this popularity e ect a bit as users are able to use the trailer to
inspect less well-known items [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>
        Moreover, recommender systems should also align with user goals. Many
reallife recommender systems are evaluated mostly on (implicit) behavioral data such
as clicks streams and viewing times. However, such an approach has limitations
and I will show how a user-centric approach can help better understand why
users are satis ed or not, for example why users prefer diversify over prediction
accuracy as it reduces choice di culty [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ]. The behaviorist approach to
evaluation also misses that users' short term goals (i.e. their current behavior) might
not be representative of the goals they want to attain (i.e. their desired
behavior) [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ]. This is especially relevant in health and life style domains [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
        ] where
people are in need of support while changing their current behavior. I will
elaborate on an example in the energy recommendation domain, and show how a
di erent type of recommender approach and interface might help users to save
more energy [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7</xref>
        ].
Speaker
Dr. Martijn Willemsen is an expert on human decision making in
interactive systems. He is working as an associate professor in the Human-Technology
Interaction group of Eindhoven University of Technology (The Netherlands).
His primary interests lie in the understanding of cognitive processes of decision
making by means of process tracing and in the application of decision making
theory in interactive systems such as recommender systems. He is also an expert
on user-centric evaluation of adaptive systems. He is part of the core team of
the Customer Journey Research Program in the Data Science Center Eindhoven
(DSC/e) and is teaching in the joint BSc and MSc data science programs of the
Jheronimus Academy of Data Science (jads.nl).
      </p>
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