SNU Professor U Kang's Team Wins Runner-up in the Microsoft-sponsored News Recommendation World Championship

- Competition against 215 teams worldwide, won 3,000 USD worth of prize money
- Expected to enhance the personalized recommomendation feature of MSN News


▲ From left, Professor U Kang, Ph.D. student Hyunsik Jeon, SeungCheol Park, and Intern Yuna Bae

 
Professor U Kang's research team (Professor U Kang and students Hyunsik Jeon, SeungCheol Park, Yuna Bae, DeepTrade) of the SNU Department of Computer Science has, on September 28, won the runner-up prize in MIND, a news recommendation world competition hosted by Microsoft.
 
The MIND News Recommendation Competition was held for the first time this year. The result outcomes of the competition are expected to be submitted to Microsoft to contribute to the accurate personalized recommendation performance of Microsoft Online News Service (MSN), one of the largest news services in the world.
 
For the competition, Microsoft anonymized the six-week news search history of about a million users and presented it as data. This dataset, provided for learning news recommendation systems, is the largest dataset to have ever been released.
 
The competition, which lasted for about seven weeks from July 20 to September 4, drew 215 participating teams from around the world. The competition aimed to predict the last week's user news search, after learning recommended models through a five-week user news search record. As a result of evaluating and ranking the final forecast results submitted by each team, Professor U Kang's research team was runner-up and received 3,000 USD worth of prize money.
 
"News recommendations are an important service used by the digital population around the world," emphasized Professor U Kang. "I want to help individuals acquire the information they want more quickly and effectively by developing better recommendation technologies in the future," he added.
 
 
Information about the competition: https://msnews.github.io/competition.html