Presented By O’Reilly and Cloudera
Make Data Work
September 11, 2018: Training & Tutorials
September 12–13, 2018: Keynotes & Sessions
New York, NY
Ahsan Ashraf

Ahsan Ashraf
Data Scientist, Pinterest

Ahsan Ashraf is a data scientist at Pinterest focusing on recommendations and ranking for the discovery team. Previously, Ahsan worked with personal finance startup wallet.ai as part of an Insight Data Science Fellowship, where he designed and built a recommender system that drew insights into users’ spending habits from their transaction histories. Ahsan holds a PhD in condensed/soft matter physics.

Sessions

2:05pm–2:45pm Wednesday, 09/12/2018
Diversification in recommender systems: Using topical variety to increase user satisfaction
Location: 1A 06/07 Level: Intermediate
Secondary topics:  Media, Marketing, Advertising, Recommendation Systems
Ahsan Ashraf (Pinterest)
Online recommender systems often rely heavily on user engagement features. This can cause a bias toward exploitation over exploration, overoptimizing on users' interests. Content diversification is important for user satisfaction, but measuring and evaluating impact is challenging. Ahsan Ashraf outlines techniques used at Pinterest that drove ~2–3% impression gains and a ~1% time-spent gain. Read more.