In person meetup on December 3!
ACM Chicago
Dear ACM Chicago Chapter members!
On Wednesday, December 3, we are hosting an in-person event at the Northwestern University Evanston Campus.
The event will be held in Ford Hive, Room 2350 at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering. For directions and parking information, please refer to the campus
map: https://www.mccormick.northwestern.edu/contact/maps.html#tech
Event Description:
Recommender Systems for Local Journalism
Description
This talk traces the evolution of recommender systems from early heuristics and matrix factorization to modern learning-to-rank and LLM-enhanced approaches, then looks ahead to where the field is going. After a brief cross-domain survey, the focus narrows to news and local-news recommenders. Payam will present his recent research along with a forward-looking vision for how tailored recommender systems can help revitalize local journalism and support more informed, engaged communities.
About the speaker:
Payam Pourashraf
Payam Pourashraf works on the Advanced Capabilities (R&D) team at a financial company in Illinois. With a background spanning software, hardware, and computer science, he brings a full-stack perspective to his work. His recent academic research focuses on recommender systems for news, with a particular emphasis on supporting local journalism.
Beyond his industry role, Payam is committed to growing the region’s technical community as the elected Vice-Chair of ACM Chicago. He is also passionate about education, having spent five years as an adjunct faculty member at DePaul University, where he taught more than 30 course offerings in Python and applied data science.
Agenda:
(Times are Central Daylight Time)
6:00 to 6:05 PM Introductions
6:05 to 6:45 PM Talk
6:45 to 6:55 PM Q&A
6:55 to 7:00 PM Adjournment
To register, please visit our meetup page:
https://www.meetup.com/acm-chicago/events/312203738