Telefonica Research, Barcelona

Via Augusta, 177

Biography

Nava Tintarev joined Telefónica Research in March 2009. In parallell, she finished writing her PhD thesis from the University of Aberdeen where she was a member of the Natural Language Generation research group. Her thesis focuses on generating explanations for recommender systems. In her thesis project she has conducted a rigorous investigation into what kind of explanations are best for decision support contra acceptance. The defense is expected to be in September 2009.

She has been an invited student speaker at the recommender systems summer school (2006), doctoral consortium at the recommender systems conference (2007), and at the Amazon office in Scotland (2008). In 2008, she received the James Chen best student paper award at the International Conference on Adaptive Hypermedia.

Research Interests:

HCI/User-centered design, Recommender Systems, Semantic similarity metrics, Natural language generation, Explanations.

Some of the things I'm  working on:

• Personalization for a travel scenario in conjunction with WeKnowIt.
• I have also been working with colleagues (Xavier Amatriain, J.M. Pujol, Nuria Oliver) to study noise (inconsistency) in user ratings, and how this affects errors in accuracy as well as user satisfaction with recommendations.