2024 in Review

In my end-of-year blogging, I usually provide an update on my toolbox, and a review of the year.

So what’s happened? A quick (and likely incomplete) summary…

• Taught recommender systems (DSCI 641) for the first time at Drexel.
• Taught 2 terms (spring and fall 2024) of INFO 659 (Intro to Data Analytics), revising material and pacing in the second offering.
• Proposed a new class for AY2025–2026 on Data Workflow Engineering (reproducible, adaptable data science and analytics workflows, model maintenance and monitoring, some ML Ops, etc.).
• Proposed a Ph.D. seminar course, which I will teach in winter quarter 2025, on fairness.
• Recruited 2 Ph.D. students.
• Launched my new lab.
• Mostly finished a significant LensKit upgrade to make it easier to use and extend.
• Presented 3 papers at ECIR 2024.
• Gave a keynote at the ECIR Workshop on Information Retrieval for Understudied Users (IR4U2).
• Gave a keynote at the RecSys Workshop on Risks, Opportunities, and Evaluation of Generative Models in Recommender Systems (ROEGEN).
• Participated in a panel for the SIGIR workshop on LLMs for Evaluation.
• Gave seminar talks at CU Boulder and TU Delft.
• Two papers in TORS went to publication (distributional evaluation and values).
• Published a short paper in RecSys with Andrés Ferraro and Christine Bauer on gender bias in music recommendation.
• Co-organized the 7th FAccTRec workshop at RecSys 2024.
• Co-organized the 1st AltRecSys workshop at RecSys 2024.
• Gave a tutorial at RecSys 2024 on our POPROX news recommender platform.
• Contributed to significant progress on building out POPROX and mamking it ready for research.
• Submitted 4 grant proposals, and made significant progress on a 5th.
• Submitted my first papers with Drexel Ph.D. students.
• Co-authored a paper in the HEAL workshop at CHI on LLM fairness.
• Joined Fernando Diaz and Bhaskar Mitra on another paper currently under review.
• Served on the department’s 2023–2024 faculty search committee.
• Served on the department Ph.D. committee.
• Joined my first Drexel Ph.D. comprehensive exam committees.
• Generally settled in to Drexel.
• Wrote yet another fine system monitor.
• Set up my lab’s equipment (with help from Drexel CCI IT) to measure power. consumption of recommender systems experiments.
• Bought a house in Philadelphia (and moved into it).
• Probably finished losing my religion.
• Set up a lot of new hardware at both work and home.

It’s been a year!