With over 2,000 registered users, Lancaster’s Vision IPTV system is a purpose-built research platform that allows experimentation of new media and web technologies. In a collaboration between Lancaster and TU-Berlin’s Distributed Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (DAI-Labor), Jing Yuan and her colleagues at DAI-Labor investigated a novel approach in analysing a large corpus of TV programme and user interaction data extracted from Vision’s statistics database. We use a LDA-based topic model, with a tailored extension to capture 2-dimensional contextual information, to infer latent user preference and user interaction distributions. In the next step, we’ll generalise the model and integrate it in Vision’s production environment for user evaluation.

Context-aware LDA: Balancing Relevance and Diversity in TV Content Recommenders
Yuan, J., Sivrikaya, F., Hopfgartner. F., Lommatzsch, A., and Mu, M., to appear in 2nd Workshop on Recommendation Systems for Television and Online Video in conjuction with the 9th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (ACM Recsys). 09/2015