Understanding the Visual Dynamics of Opinions and Purchases

Oct 25, 2016
Julian McAuley

CSE Professor Julian McAuley will speak on Wednesday as part of the Design Lab's Design@Large Fall 2016 lecture series. His topic: "Understanding the Visual Dynamics of Opinions and Purchases".

Date: Wednesday, October 26
Time: 4:00pm - 5:15pm
Location: Room 1202, CSE Building

Abstract: Services such as Amazon, Yelp, Netflix etc. aim to personalize content to users by means of so-called "recommender systems." Such systems work by modeling users' previous activities (ratings, purchases, clicks, and so on) in order to estimate how they will respond to new content in future. In this talk, McAuley will give a high-level introduction to such systems, and discuss in particular how the visual appearance of items can be modeled for applications such as clothing recommendation. Understanding the visual dimensions of people's opinions can help to provide better recommendations, but also to understand how visual preferences (i.e., "fashions") have changed over time.

Bio:  Julian McAuley has been an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at the University of California San Diego since 2014. Previously he was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University after receiving his Ph.D. from the Australian National University in 2011. His research is concerned with developing predictive models of human behavior using large volumes of online activity data.

Visit the Design@Large Facebook page to register if you plan to attend.