#27: Recommender Systems at the BBC with Alessandro Piscopo and Duncan Walker

Recsperts - Recommender Systems Experts

In episode 27 of Recsperts, we meet Alessandro Piscopo, Lead Data Scientist in Personalization and Search, and Duncan Walker, Principal Data Scientist in the iPlayer Recommendations Team, both from the BBC. We discuss how the BBC personalizes recommendations across different offerings like news or video and audio content recommendations. We learn about the core values for the oldest public service media organization and the collaboration with editors in that process.

The BBC once started with short video recommendations for BBC+ and nowadays has to consider recommendations across multiple domains: news, the iPlayer, BBC Sounds, BBC Bytesize, and more. With a reach of about 500M+ users who access services every week there is a huge potential. My guests discuss the challenges of aligning recommendations with public service values and the role of editors and constant exchange, alignment, and learning between the algorithmic and editorial lines of recommender systems.
We also discuss the potential of cross-domain recommendations to leverage the content across different products as well as the organizational setup of teams working on recommender systems at the BBC. We learn about skews in the data due to the nature of an online service that also has a linear offering with TV and radio services.

Towards the end, we also touch a bit on QUARE @ RecSys, which is the Workshop on Measuring the Quality of Explanations in Recommender Systems.

Enjoy this enriching episode of RECSPERTS - Recommender Systems Experts.
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• (00:00) - Introduction
• (03:10) - About Alessandro Piscopo and Duncan Walker
• (14:53) - RecSys Applications at the BBC
• (20:22) - Journey of Building Public Service Recommendations
• (28:02) - Role and Implementation of Public Service Values
• (36:52) - Algorithmic and Editorial Recommendation
• (01:01:54) - Further RecSys Challenges at the BBC
• (01:15:53) - Quare Workshop
• (01:23:27) - Closing Remarks

Links from the Episode:

• Alessandro Piscopo on LinkedIn
• Duncan Walker on LinkedIn
• BBC
• QUARE @ RecSys 2023 (2nd Workshop on Measuring the Quality of Explanations in Recommender Systems)

Papers:

• Clarke et al. (2023): Personalised Recommendations for the BBC iPlayer: Initial approach and current challenges
• Boididou et al. (2021): Building Public Service Recommenders: Logbook of a Journey
• Piscopo et al. (2019): Data-Driven Recommendations in a Public Service Organisation

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• Recsperts Website