My name is Azin Ghazimatin. I am a Research Scientist at Spotify, Berlin, Germany. My research focuses on applying principles of responsible AI, such as explainability and fairness, to search and recommender systems. I completed my PhD in 2021 at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrücken, Germany. The focus of my PhD research was on Transparency and Explainability of Recommender Systems. After my PhD, I worked for half a year as an Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon, Berlin, Germany, investigating fairness-related problems in search systems. Prior to my PhD, I worked for six months as a Research Assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, contributing to enhancing privacy in search systems.
azing at spotify.com
News
- Oct 2024: Check out the blog post of our recently accepted paper "PODTILE: Facilitating Podcast Episode Browsing with Auto-generated Chapters"
- Sep 2023: My Beat interview: This is how I spend my day at Spotify!
- March 2023 BTW Conference, Dresden, Germany
- Jan 2023 Received German Computer Science Society's best Dissertation Award (2023) in the field of Databases and Information Systems (GI DBIS Dissertationpreis)
- July 2022: Featured talk on ELIXIR, QUARE workshop at SIGIR 2022
- March 2022: Starting a full-time job at Spotify as a Research Scientist!
- December 2021: Defended my PhD with a summa cum laude!
- August 2021: Starting a research internship at Amazon, Berlin
Selected Publications
- PODTILE: Facilitating Podcast Episode Browsing with Auto-generated Chapters Azin Ghazimatin and Ekaterina Garmash, Gustavo Penha, Kristen Sheets, Martin Achenbach, Oguz Semerci, Remi Galvez, Marcus Tannenberg, Sahitya Mantravadi, Divya Narayanan, Ofeliya Kalaydzhyan, Doug Cole, Ben Carterette, Ann Clifton, Paul Bennett, Claudia Hauff, Mounia Lalmas ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) 2024
- Measuring Fairness of Rankings under Noisy Sensitive Information Azin Ghazimatin, Matthäus Kleindessner, Chris Russell, Ziawasch Abedjan, and Jacek GolebiowskiACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT) 2022[PDF][Code]
- Enhancing Explainability and Scrutability of Recommender Systems Azin GhazimatinPhD Thesis [PDF]
- Counterfactual Explanations for Neural Recommenders Khanh Hiep Tran, Azin Ghazimatin and Rishiraj Saha Roy 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2021) [PDF][Code][Video]
- ELIXIR: Learning from User Feedback on Explanations to Improve Recommender Models Azin Ghazimatin, Soumajit Pramanik, Rishiraj Saha Roy, and Gerhard Weikum 30th The Web Conference 2021 [PDF] [Video] [Code and Data]
- Explaining Recommendations in Heterogeneous Networks Azin Ghazimatin 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2020)Doctoral Consortium [PDF]
- PRINCE: Provider-side Interpretability with Counterfactual Explanations in Recommender Systems Azin Ghazimatin, Oana Balalau, Rishiraj Saha Roy, and Gerhard Weikum 13th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2020) [PDF] [Code]
- FAIRY: A Framework for Understanding Relationships between Users’ Actions and their Social Feeds
Azin Ghazimatin, Rishiraj Saha Roy, Gerhard Weikum
12th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2019) [PDF] [Code]
Teaching
- Information Retrieval and Data Mining (Coordinator), Saarland University, winter semester 2019-2020
- Information Retrieval and Data Mining (TA), Saarland University, winter semester 2017-2018
Recent Positions
- August 2021 - February 2022
Applied scientist intern at Amazon, Berlin, Germany - September 2016 - February 2017
Research assistant at Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Saarbrücken, Germany - November 2015 - February 2017
Saarbrücken Graduate School of Computer Science, Germany
Education
- March 2017 - December 2021: Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Saarbrücken, Germany. Ph.D. in Computer Science.
- September 2012 - August 2014: Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. M.Sc. in Softwares and Systems
- September 2008 - September 2012: Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. B.Sc. in Software Engineering