News

March 2018 I attended the ACM IUI 2018 conference in Tokyo, Japan. We had good news since the paper we wrote with my master student Ivania Donoso obtained a Best paper honorable mention. You can find the paper in the ACM DL or the pre-print directly here An Interactive Relevance Feedback Interface for Evidence-Based Health Care". At the end of March I will attend the ECIR conference in Grenoble.

January 2018 Our SocVis lab starts 2018 with three conference papers accepted. In EI, "CNVis: A Web-Based Visual Analytics Tool for Exploring Conference Navigator Data" in collaboration with professor Chaoli Wang from Notre Dame. In ACM IUI, the article "An Interactive Relevance Feedback Interface for Evidence-Based Health Care", which was the master's thesis project of my student Ivania Donoso. Finally, in ECIR "Learning to Leverage Microblog Information for QA Retrieval" by Jose Miguel Herrera, in collaboration with his advisor Prof. Barbara Poblete. Great start!

August 2017 I attended the ACM RecSys 2017 conference in Como, Italy. This was the first time I attended with my advised students, so it was a great experience! find some pictures here. We presented two posters in the main conference: pyRecLab: A Software Library for Quick Prototyping of Recommender Systems with Gabriel Sepulveda, Vicente Dominguez, and Towards a Recommender System for Undergraduate Research. with Felipe Del Rio, Jovan Kuzmicic, and Erick Svec. Moreover, we presented one poster in the Deep Learning for RecSys workshop, our work on artwork recommendation using visual features. I also presented a demo of the last version of Moodplay, a work we are doing with students Raimundo Herrera and Pablo Pino. Finally, I also co-organized the Large Scale RecSys (LSRS 2017) workshop, again a great experience!

June 2017 In a collaboration with professors Christoph Trattner and David Elsweiler, we have published a journal article at PLoS One journal: Monitoring obesity prevalence in the United States through bookmarking activities in online food portals. We analyzed data from the web site and online community allrecipes.com as well as official census data on obesity prevalence in the US, and we were able to related these data, showing that it is possible to understand health issues from aggregating users' activity online. Check more details in the paper, it is Open Access.

March 2017 I receive a WWW 2017 Outstanding Reviewer Award. I am really flattered and glad of this award, since I believe that good constructive reviews (even those rejecting my work) have helped me a lot on improving my research, and I try to do the same for others.

March 2017 A new term starts in Chile in March. I will be teaching IIC1005 Introduction to Computer Science, as well as a module on Recommender Systems in the professional diploma on Big Data at PUC Chile. In march I am attending the IUI 2017 conference (Limassol, Cyprus) and I will also travel to Brasil as part of the committee of the master thesis of Luiz Raul Sanchez Vazquez at Federal University of Minas Gerais, invited by his advisor, Professor Rodrygo Santos.

September 2016 I attended the ACM RecSys 2016 conference in Boston, USA. In collaboration with Dr. Chris Trattner, we presented "Understanding the Impact of Weather for POI Recommendations." In another collaboration, led by Prof. Katrien Verbert, we presented "Scalable Exploration of Relevance Prospects to Support Decision Making." I also co-organized the Large-Scale Recsys Workshop with Tao Ye (Pandora) and Danny Bickson (Dato) Slides here.

August 2016 Second term starting at PUC Chile! Don't miss the Data Science Day 1, tools for information visualization.

July 2016 I attended the UMAP 2016 conference in Halifax, Canada. In addition to presenting our paper "Moodplay: Interactive Mood-based Music Discovery and Recommendation", I gave an invited talk at the IFUP Workshop, titled "Data Fusion for Dealing with the Recommendation Problem", slides here. I also gave another invited talk at the FuturePD workshop about ways to expand our Moodplay system with respect to the emotional context.

May 2016 Our first article on the Moodplay system (link to demo video), a music artists' recommender system based on emotions, was accepted at the UMAP 2016 conference. This is a collaboration with Ivana Andjelkovic and John O'Donovan from University of California, Santa Barbara. In addition, online media in Chile has covered our work such as EMOL, La Tercera, Diario Financiero, and I have also given some interviews to radio stations such as BioBio, Tele13 and Rock & Pop. Read the official news released by the School of Engineering at PUC about this project.

January 2016 From January 9th to February 6th I'll be visiting the University of Notre Dame (IN) as guest assistant professor to work on topics of Information Visualization and Recommender Systems with Professor Chaoli Wang. I am really excited about this collaboration and for visiting the US again after finishing my PhD in 2013 in Pittsburgh.

November 2015 I gave a talk on Recommender Systems in the StarTechConf, very interesting since the public is made mostly of software developers so the typical academic talk won't fit in. I also gave a talk at the research seminar of the Institute for Complex Systems in Engineering at University of Chile, thanks to Richard Weber for the invitation.

September 2015 Attended the ACM RecSys 2015 Conference. We presented 2 short papers and one poster. The papers were about Time-aware collaborative filtering [pre-print pdf], and a study of whether data from virtual worlds can help us make recommendations on the real world for LBSN [pre-print pdf]. The poster was in different area, we studied a way of generalizing the SLIM recommendation model, a state-of-the-art sparse model for matrix factorization [pre-print pdf]. The best news was that our collaborator Leandro Balby-Marinho won the best paper award for the article [Context-Aware Event Recommendation in Event-based Social Networks ]

August 2015 In addition to the 2 short papers accepted at ACM RecSys, we have a poster in collaboration with the PUC GRIMA group: "Towards Improving Top-N Recommendation by Generalization of SLIM" [pre-print pdf]. I am also co-organizing the Workshop on Social Computing and Personalization, co-located at ACM SIGIR 2015, which will be held in August 13th in Centro de Extensión at PUC Chile. This month is also starting the Spring term in PUC Chile (Aug-Dec), where I am teaching the Exploratory Course of the Major in Computer Science and the graduate course in Recommender Systems, IIC 3633, 2015.

July 2015 The hard work of the last year paid off and we have two papers accepted at the ACM RecSys 2015 conference. "Good Times Bad Times: A Study on Recency Effects in Collaborative Filtering for Social Tagging"[pre-print pdf] and "Are Real-World Place Recommender Algorithms Useful in Virtual World Environments?" [pre-print pdf]. See more details in our SocVis research group web site.

June 2015 - A month of talks! I have been invited to talk about Visual Approaches for Recommender Systems at Universidad de los Andes by Profesor Claudio Alvarez. I have also been invited to talk about User-centric Recommender Systems at the 1st Workshop on User Centered Research organized by Telefonica I+D, Santiago, Chile. I'll also give a talk at University of Chile, but in November of 2015.

February of 2015 - A journal article I co-wrote with Prof. Peter Brusilovsky about the visual recommender interface I developed called SetFusion [link to ppt and video] with a very complete user study and evaluation has been accepted at IJHCS. Find it (and cite it) as Denis Parra, Peter Brusilovsky, User-controllable personalization: A case study with SetFusion, Int. J. Human-Computer Studies [http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2015.01.007]. If you want a pre-print manuscript just drop me an e-mail.

June 2015 - A month of talks! I have been invited to talk about Visual Approaches for Recommender Systems at Universidad de los Andes by Profesor Claudio Alvarez. I have also been invited to talk about User-centric Recommender Systems at the 1st Workshop on User Centered Research organized by Telefonica I+D, Santiago, Chile. I'll also give a talk at University of Chile, but in November of 2015.

February of 2015 - A journal article I co-wrote with Prof. Peter Brusilovsky about the visual recommender interface I developed called SetFusion [link to ppt and video] with a very complete user study and evaluation has been accepted at IJHCS. Find it (and cite it) as Denis Parra, Peter Brusilovsky, User-controllable personalization: A case study with SetFusion, Int. J. Human-Computer Studies [http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2015.01.007]. If you want a pre-print manuscript just drop me an e-mail.

November 11th of 2014 - I won the contest for an invited talk at the "Chilean Computing Conference 2014", and presented my research on Recommender Systems. Find the slides here. The abstract of my talk is at the home page of the event, JCC 2014.

August 2014 - I am teaching Recommender Systems (IIC 3633) this second term of 2014 (From August 4th to Nov 30th) in PUC CHile. Course is taught in Spanish.

March 2014 - I am local and publicity chair at the ACM Hypertext Conference 2014, which will be held at PUC Chile in September 1-4 of 2014. See more information at ht.acm.org/ht2014