The Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence Symposium Series (HCAI@OVGU) aims to unite experts from academia and industry to discuss key topics like Responsible AI, Explainable AI, and Fairness.
The event, organized by the Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence Research Group, was held at the Faculty of Computer Science, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, from 4 to 5 November 2024.
One of the keynote speakers at this year’s event was also Marko Tklačič from HICUP Lab with a talk titled “Positive Psychology in User Modeling and Recommender Systems“. The abstract of the talk is: “Recommender systems, such as those used by Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon, rely on past user interaction data (e.g., clicks, views, purchases) to build models that predict the utility of items to recommend. Traditionally, these systems have been optimized to align with the commercial goals of the content providers—for instance, Netflix’s recommendations are designed primarily to reduce subscription churn rather than to maximize user satisfaction. However, recent research has shifted focus towards enhancing the actual user experience. One promising direction explores this experience through the lens of positive psychology, particularly using the constructs of hedonic (pleasure-focused) and eudaimonic (purpose-driven) experiences. In this talk, I will introduce these concepts and demonstrate how they can be leveraged to model users and items, ultimately leading to more meaningful and satisfying recommendations.“