A team that includes Clemson University is inviting volunteers to sign up for a free daily newsletter that delivers a list of Associated Press news stories personally curated for each individual reader.
The ad-free newsletter is helping researchers study crucial questions surrounding recommender systems– the unseen algorithms that push content to users on social-media feeds and popular movie and music platforms.
With each click of a story in the newsletter, the selection becomes more tailored to the individual reader while also providing valuable data for researchers. Readers are invited to answer a short survey each Friday that helps further improve the newsletter
It takes only a couple of minutes to sign up here.
“Our goal is to get people to enjoy reading the news,” said Bart Knijnenburg, an associate professor in the School of Computing. “Advertising rewards clicks, not long-term engagement. We want to study that longer-term perspective and encourage industry to adopt it.”
Researchers are calling the newsletter POPROX News. POPROX is short for Platform for OPen Recommendation and Online eXperimentation.
It is a collaboration among the University of Minnesota, Clemson University, Northwestern University, Drexel University and the University of Colorado Boulder, with support from the National Science Foundation and the Associated Press.
The platform helps address one of the toughest challenges in studying recommender systems. Most academic work relies on old or simulated data instead of observing real people. POPROX instead tests live algorithms with real users reading real news.
The newsletter selects 10 stories for each subscriber, pulling each morning directly from the Associated Press. So far, it has been curated to each reader’s interests, but researchers plan to soon also mix in the day’s most important headlines if they aren’t already included.
“People want personalization in news, but personalization is not the end all be all,” Knijnenburg said. “When you get a daily newsletter, it is great if it is to some extent personalized. But it shouldn’t just be aligned with your interests, because you also want to know what is the important news of the day.”
Unlike other newsletters, POPROX News includes no ads and isn’t owned by a media company. It is independent, nonprofit, and built solely for research. Readers help improve the technology simply by clicking on the headlines most interesting to them and, when possible, answering short surveys.
Knijnenburg said news was chosen to study recommender systems because it is both socially important and technically difficult.
Ultimately, he hopes the research inspires a new generation of algorithms that serve users instead of trapping them in echo chambers.
Brian Dean, the C. Tycho Howle Director of Clemson’s School of Computing, said POPROX is an example of research with real-world impact.
“Artificial intelligence is already shaping how people get their information, and Clemson researchers are helping shape that in a way that benefits everyone,” Dean said. “POPROX shows how our work in computing can improve lives here in South Carolina and far beyond.”
