Modern Recommender Systems: from Computing Matrices to Thinking with Neurons

Starting with the Netflix Prize, which fueled much recent progress in the field of collaborative filtering, recent years have witnessed rapid development of new recommendation algorithms and increasingly more complex systems, which greatly differ from their early content-based and collaborative filtering systems. Modern recommender systems leverage several novel algorithmic approaches: from matrix factorization methods and multi-armed bandits to deep neural networks. In this tutorial, we will cover recent algorithmic advances in recommender systems, highlight their capabilities, and their impact. We will give many examples of industrial-scale recommender systems that define the future of the recommender systems area. We will discuss related evaluation issues, and outline future research directions. The ultimate goal of the tutorial is to encourage the application of novel recommendation approaches to solve problems that go beyond user consumption and to further promote research in the intersection of recommender systems and databases.