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Picture of Mounia Lalmas-Roelleke

The aim of the Personalization mission at Spotify is to “connect listeners and creators in a unique and enriching way”, says Dr Mounia Lalmas-Roelleke, at Spotify.

The Digital Futures Machine Learning day on 17 January was a success with a big and active audience. The main objective behind the event was to map the rich landscape of machine learning research at KTH, Stockholm University and RISE, and inform about collaborative opportunities. It was organized by professors Aristides Gionis, Pawel Herman and Alexandre Proutiere and included a rich program of keynote speakers, research presentations and poster sessions. Stay tuned for an upcoming article by the organizers.

One of the keynote speakers was Dr Mounia Lalmas-Roelleke, Director of Research & Head of Tech Research in Personalization at Spotify.

In her keynote on “Personalizing and diversifying the listening experience”, Dr Lalmas-Roelleke talked about how to make personalization work and the importance of diversity in personalization. The aim of the personalization mission at Spotify is to “connect listeners and creators in a unique and enriching way”, explained Dr Lalmas- Roelleke. She also described some of the (research) work to achieve this, from using machine learning to understanding listening diversity.

Image of slide from Spotify at Machine Learning day

In her role as Director of Research at Spotify, and the Head of Tech Research in Personalisation, Mounia Lalmas-Roelleke leads an interdisciplinary team of research scientists, working on personalization and discovery. Mounia also holds an honorary professorship at University College London. In January 2022, she took an additional appointment as a Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam. Before that, she was a Director of Research at Yahoo, where she led a team of researchers working on advertising quality.

She also worked with various teams at Yahoo on topics related to user engagement in the context of news, search, and user-generated content. Prior to this, she held a Microsoft Research/RAEng Research Chair at the School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow. Before that, she was Professor of Information Retrieval at the Department of Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London.