Robin Burke

I am a professor in the Department of Information (and Computer Science, by courtesy) at the University of Colorado, Boulder and the director of That Recommender Systems Lab. I was previously co-director of the Web Intelligence Lab in the School of Computing at DePaul University.

I earned my PhD in Computer Science in 1993 at Northwestern University's Institute for the Learning Sciences, under the supervision of Dr. Roger Schank, and before DePaul, worked at the University of Chicago, the University of California Irvine, California State University Fullerton, and the long-gone dot-com startup Verb.

See complete CV.

Research

I conduct research mostly in recommender systems and personalization, more generally. Recently, I have been interested in three closely-related topics:

• Multistakeholder recommendation, which refers to a recommendation application in which parties other than just the end user need to be considered in computing recommendation outcomes. If that sounds a bit shady, it is perhaps because we are accustomed to think of recommender systems as reflecting only user interests and to do otherwise seems to undermine the whole enterprise. However, there are many situations (for example, health, education, etc.) where the system may have its own ethically-sound reasons for preferring certain recommendations over others.
• Fairness-aware recommendation is a sub-class of multistakeholder recommendation in which the system has a concern for delivering results that meet some criterion of fairness. That criterion may exist relative to the users consuming recommendations C-Fairness or relative to the providers of items being recommended P-Fairness or both.
• Community governance for recommender systems, which asks the question of how recommendation can be designed and operated in a way that is amenable to governance by the community for whom it operates, and how input from various stakeholders can be incorporated to guide recommender system behavior.

I am also interested in practical problems of conducting recommender systems research and achieving replicable results.

In addition, I have research interests in the digital humanities and am part of the Reading Chicago Reading research group.

Teaching

I will not be teaching in Fall 2024 or Spring 2025.

Spring 2024: INFO 6500

Information Science Seminar

Fall 2023: INFO 5612

Recommender Systems

Fall 2023: INFO 6500

Information Science Seminar

Fall 2022: INFO 5604

Applied Machine Learning

Fall 2021: INFO 4613

Network Science

Spring 2021: INFO 4871/CSCI 4830

Special topics: Bias and Fairness in Artificial Intelligence

Fall 2019: INFO 4871/5871

Data Science for Information Science: Research in information science often requires gathering, managing, analyzing, processing, and understanding complex data. This course introduces tools from computing and statistics to develop students' skills in the following areas: (1) data wrangling, the process of acquiring, cleaning, reshaping, and/or sampling data; (2) data exploration and analysis, the extraction of meaningful signals in large, noisy datasets, especially data consisting of unstructured or semi-structured text and relational (network-oriented) data; (3) predictive modeling, the creation of models to support inferences and decisions based on data; and (4) communication, the summarization and visualization of findings to be shared with others.

Spring 2019: INFO 4871/5871

Recommender Systems: This is a research seminar that will explore the space of personalized information access applications known as recommender systems. This class will introduce students to a range of approaches for building recommender systems including collaborative, content-based, knowledge-based,and hybrid methods. Students will also explore a variety of applications for recommendation including consumer products, music, social media, and online advertising. The course will also examine controversies surrounding recommendation, including Pariser’s “filter bubble”, the deployment of personalization as a tool for electoral manipulation, and questions of algorithmic bias.

RecSys

I have been conducting research in the area of recommender systems since the mid-1990s, and have been involved with the ACM Recommender Systems Conference since its founding. I was the chair of the steering committee for the conference from 2017 to 2020.

Contact

Prospective PhD students, please see this FAQ file.

robin(dot)burke(at)colorado(dot)edu

• Department of Information Science, Rm 115
• 1045 18th Street, UCB 315
• Boulder, CO 80309
• 303-735-1772