Presenters
Profiles and affiliations of the seven researchers behind this tutorial, from Huawei Ireland Research Center and University College Dublin.
Roger Zhe Li
Huawei Ireland Research Center, Dublin, Ireland
Senior Research Scientist at the Huawei Ireland Research Center, leading ads recommendation R&D covering multi-modal semantic IDs and CVR prediction, with the system serving over 250 million users globally. He holds a PhD from TU Delft, with publications at SIGIR, WSDM, RecSys, and ICTIR. He was recognized as an outstanding PC member at RecSys '25, and served as an invited industry speaker on multi-modal semantic IDs at ECIR '26.
Aghiles Salah
Huawei Ireland Research Center, Dublin, Ireland
Principal Research Scientist at the Huawei Ireland Research Center. His research spans machine learning and recommender systems, with publications in tier-1 conferences and journals. He co-delivered hands-on tutorials on multimodal recommender systems at RecSys '21 and WebConf '23, and is the pioneer and one of the main contributors of the Cornac recommendation framework. Over more than a decade, Aghiles taught undergraduate and master's courses on machine learning and recommender systems at the University of Paris, France.
Mete Sertkan
Huawei Ireland Research Center, Dublin, Ireland
Senior Research Scientist at the Huawei Ireland Research Center working on ads recommendation. His research interests span recommender systems, user modeling, information retrieval, and evaluation, with publications in top-tier venues including ACL, CIKM, UMAP, RecSys, and SIGIR. He holds a PhD from TU Wien, where he taught master's courses on recommender systems, social network analysis, and innovation.
Changhong Jin
University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
Assistant Professor of Computer Science at University College Dublin. His recent work covers recommender-system auditing, ad recommendation under limited availability of personalized features, and generative recommendation with semantic IDs. He has contributed to publications at CIKM, The Web Conference, and ACL, and delivered a one-hour tutorial on recommender-system auditing at the ECML-PKDD 2025 AIDEM workshop.
Yingjie Niu
Huawei Ireland Research Center, Dublin, Ireland
Research Scientist at the Huawei Ireland Research Center, working on ads recommendation and multi-modal semantic IDs. His research interests span recommender systems and large language models, with publications in tier-1 venues including ACL and WWW. He holds a PhD from University College Dublin, where he taught master's courses on machine learning and information systems.
Ruihai Dong
University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
Associate Professor of Computer Science at University College Dublin. His research focuses on Machine Learning and Deep Learning with applications in recommender systems and finance. He has published widely in top venues (e.g., WWW, RecSys, ACL, IJCAI) and served on their program committees. He co-authored the RecSys '23 Best Student Paper and has co-organized the EARL Workshop series on Evaluating and Applying Recommender Systems with Large Language Models, colocated with RecSys since 2024.
Barry Smyth
University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
Full Professor of Computer Science at University College Dublin and a founding figure of recommender systems, with over three decades of work on user modeling, case-based reasoning, and personalization, amassing over 28,000 citations and an h-index of 85.
Maintained by Roger Zhe Li — Last updated: 2026