Example Applications

Recommender Systems are used in a variety of applications. The most popular ones being probably movies, news, and e-commerce. However, recommendation systems are used in many applications more. To get an initial idea of what recommender systems are and what they can do, have a look at the following blog posts.

Google Android Users May Emphasize Importance of News Recommendations

Google Android phones display news recommendations on the very left virtual screen (at least on my Pixel 5 phone). Until now, users only were able to remove entire news sources or topics, as shown below. However, now, users seem also to be allowed choosing to see “more” or “less” news of a certain topic. 2021-08-18 […]

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‘Microsoft Academic’ Discontinued

Microsoft announced to discontinue its Microsoft Academic Services (MAS), including its Academic Search Engine (like Google Scholar) and Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG). This is a sad day for the recommender system community, particularly the community around recommender systems for digital libraries. Microsoft Academic was a very valuable source for data to build recommender systems, and […]

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Alyce, a personalized corporate gifting service raises $30M

Alyce offers personalized corporate gifts for employees and business partners. It offers several plug-ins to e.g. Chrome or Salesforce, and then makes recommendations for gifts that you could give to your staff or business partners. On April 8, 2021, the CEO and founder Greg announced a 30 million US$ series B funding.

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Google Maps’ route recommendations now consider environment/fuel consumption

Sustainability and eco-friendliness found their way into Google Maps. Google announced that Google Maps will offer route recommendations that might take a bit longer than the fastest route, but that have lower fuel consumption. Read more in Google’s blog: https://blog.google/products/maps/redefining-what-map-can-be-new-information-and-ai/

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Spotify Adds New Personalized Playlists: Favorite Artists, Genres, and Decades

Spotify announced to introduce three new personalized playlists. The playlists will feature your favorite artists, genre, and decade. Now, we’re excited to share three new mix categories with clearer names that are easier to understand and remember, that will evolve with you: artist mix, genre mix, and decade mix. Based on the music you already love, while offering […]

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Microsoft Starts New ‘Because You Liked…’ Game Recommendation Feature For Xbox Game Pass [Laurent Giret @ OnMSFT]

Microsoft has started testing a new Xbox feature that will help gamers find new Xbox Game Pass games to play based on their previous gaming activity. The feature was introduced in a recent preview update for Xbox Insiders in the Alpha Skip-Ahead and Alpha rings, and it could be released as soon as next month with the […]

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Germany’s online stores do not use personalized pricing

A study by the German Ministry for Justice found that online shops in Germany do not use personalized pricing, as reported by several news outlets (FAZ, Deutschlandfunk). There have occasionally been rumors that shops (in Germany) were using different prices base on a user’s location, device, IP, or other information. Apparently, these rumors were not […]

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Netflix launches ‘Downloads for You’: Automatic Downloads of Recommended Series and Movies

Three years after Netflix introduced ‘Smart Downloads‘, Patrick Flemming (Director, Product Innovation) announces ‘Downloads For You’. Downloads For You, a new feature that automatically downloads recommended shows or movies to your mobile device based on your tastes.  https://about.netflix.com/en/news/downloads-for-you-takes-on-the-go-to-the-next-level As of now, it’s only available on Android apps. iOS will be following soon.

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Google Scholar re-designs its research-paper recommender system

Google Scholar re-designed its recommender system as announced by Namit Shetty, Alex Verstak, Kyu Jin Hwang, Linghua Jin, Philippe David, and Anurag Acharya. Your Scholar Recommendations just got better – fresher, more relevant, and easier to scan. If you have a Scholar profile and are actively publishing, your Scholar homepage should have recommended articles that […]

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Porsche adds a recommendation system to its car configurator

Porsche announced in a press release that Porsche has added a recommendation function to its Car Configurator. Porsche claims to have trained 270 neural networks on several million data points and they report an astonishing 90% accuracy. I am not sure though, how accuracy was calculated exactly. A user can start the recommendation engine by […]

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