When Recommendation Systems Go Bad

For our next and final meetup of 2015, we are pleased to welcome Evan Estola. Evan is Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Meetup.com, where he works on recommendations and other large-scale data problems.

When Recommendation Systems Go Bad

Machine learning and recommendations systems have changed the way we interact with not just the internet, but some of the basic products and services that we use to organize and run our life. As the people that build these systems, we have a social responsibility to consider how these systems affect people, and furthermore, we should do whatever we can to prevent these systems and models from perpetuating some of the prejudice and bias that exist in our society today.

In this talk I intend to cover some of the recommendation systems that have gone wrong across various industries, and attempt to provide some solutions for prevention. First and foremost among these is awareness, but approaches involving interpretable models, using ensemble models to separate features that shouldn't interact, and designing test data sets for capturing bias will also be explored.

Many thanks to Meetup.com for hosting this talk, and for providing food and beverages!