Linas Baltrunas

All of my career I have worked in the domain of algorithmic personalization. This involves creating new machine learning algorithms or applying known research in the personalization domain.

 

I obtained my Bachelor degree in Computer Science from Vilnius University. Later I moved to a small mountain city Bozen-Bolzano (FUB). I love mountains and AI, therefore, I stayed at FUB a bit longer to obtain my Ph.D degree under the supervision of Prof. Francesco Ricci. During the Ph.D. studies I introduced and evaluated a methodology supporting the full cycle of building a Context Aware Collaborative Filtering Recommender Systems. It includes: two phases of data acquisition, a well tuned algorithm capable of generating explanations for the recommendations, and a graphical user interface. I created more scalable and more accurate algorithms compared to those previously known in literature. 

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After my graduation I moved to Telefonica Research lab, Barcelona, Spain, where I was further pushing state of the art in personalization research.

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Currently I am working at Netflix in Los Gatos, California where I use data to optimize entertainment business.