Student Achievements

• My first Ph.D. student Amifa Raj successfully defended in June, and is now an applied scientist at Microsoft.
• My second Ph.D. student Ngozi Ihemelandu successfully defended in December, and is now on the job market.
• Srabanti Guha successfully completed her M.S. project and defense in May. Since Drexel info sci’s M.S. programs are not research-based, she is probably my last M.S. advisee for the foreseeable future.
• Undergrad RA Christine Pinney first-authored and presented a full paper at CHIIR 2023 on gender in IR research, in collaboration with Amifa, Alex Hanna, and myself.
• Amifa’s internship project (on which I collaborated) published as a short paper in SIGIR 2023.
• Ngozi’s work on statistical inference for recommender system experiments published as a short paper in SIGIR 2023.
• Ngozi’s work on candidate set sampling in recsys evaluation published at WI-IAT 2023.
• Amifa’s work on measuring fairness in grid layouts presented at FAccTRec 2023.
• Ngozi’s paper on multiple comparison correction in search & recsys experiments was accepted as a short paper for ECIR 2024.
• Amifa’s paper on grid-aware reranking for fairness was accepted to the IR for Good track at ECIR 2024.
• Preprint with Amifa on integrated browsing models for IR metrics.

Other Research Achievements

• Got a new grant (w/ Joe Konstan, Bart Knijnenburg, Robin Burke, and Ed Malthouse) to build a personalized news recommendation platform to support user-facing research on recommender systems.
• Published a short piece on multi-party information seeking with Sole & Katherine.
• Published an article in Transactions on Recommender Systems with Ben Carterette and Fernando Diaz on distributional evaluation of recommender systems.
• Collaborated on a demo (led by Tobias Vente and Joeran Beel) of an auto-tuning framework for LensKit.
• The many-authored paper on values in recommender systems (led by Jonathan Stray) that I contributed to is out in Transactions on Recommender Systems.
• Contributed to a position piece led by Alexandra Olteanu on the need for impact statements in responsible AI research.
• Our paper (with Sole Pera, Henriette Cramer, and Lex Beattie) on consumer impacts of IR systems was accepted to the IR for Good track at ECIR 2024.
• Submitted several more papers that unfortunately were not published.
• Started a couple new collaborations that will hopefully produce interesting results in the next year or three.
• Gave a seminar talk for University of Washington RAISE.
• Gave a seminar talk for UT Austin.
• Gave a seminar talk for University of Glasgow.
• Spoke (virtually) at an ICA post-conference.

This year I made a total of 10 paper submissions and posted 2 preprints (not counting preprints of accepted material); we had 4 rejects to get our 6 conference publications (some of which were resubmissions of work rejected last year)².

Teaching

• Taught Recommender Systems in spring term, as my last class at Boise State.
• Taught INFO 659 (Intro to Data Analytics) for my first class at Drexel.
• Begun preparations for teaching Drexel’s recommender systems class, DSCI 641.

Service & Organization

• Program committees: FAccT (AC), SIGIR, RecSys (SPC), ECIR.
• Co-organized the 6th FAccTRec workshop.
• Numerous journal reviews.
• 2 international research proposal reviews.
• Final year of FAccT executive committee service.
• TheWebConf and SIGIR best paper committees.
• Joined the editorial board for Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval.
• Drexel IS Ph.D. committee (ongoing).
• Drexel IS faculty search committee (ongoing).
• Traveled to CHIIR (Austin, TX), SIGIR (Taipei), FAccT (Chicago), and RecSys (Singapore).

Wrapup

I’m pretty sure I’ve probably forgotten a thing or two here. It’s helpful to me to sit and reflect on what I’ve gotten done in the course of a year. I’m especially glad to have such a long section of student accomplishments to list. And hopefully some reporting on rejection levels is helpful to others³.

And thank you very much to my excellent collaborators who have made all of this possible.

For the next year, there are of course many new things in planning (or progress), and I look forward to starting with some new Ph.D. students at Drexel.