Gustavo Penha

I am a research scientist at Spotify. My research areas are information retrieval, recommender systems, and natural language processing. I am currently working with (I) the intersection of LLMs and personalization, (II) increasing discoverability in search and recommendation systems, and (III) generative and dense models for IR. Beyond my job I dedicate time to photography.

news

May 26, 2023 Defended my PhD on Conversational Search and Recommendation 🎓
Apr 19, 2022 We won the best paper award with our ECIR’22 paper 🏆 🎉.
Aug 27, 2021 Finished my research internship at Amazon 📦: CHI’22 & CHIIR’22.

selected publications

  1. TheWebConf
    Improving Content Retrievability in Search with Controllable Query Generation
    Penha, Gustavo, Palumbo, Enrico, Aziz, Maryam, Wang, Alice, and Bouchard, Hugues
    PDF Blog Slides
  2. ECIR 🏆 best paper
    Evaluating the Robustness of Retrieval Pipelines with Query Variation Generators
    Penha, Gustavo, Câmara, Arthur, and Hauff, Claudia
    PDF Code Slides
  3. RecSys
    What does BERT know about books, movies and music? Probing BERT for Conversational Recommendation
    Penha, Gustavo, and Hauff, Claudia
    PDF Code Slides

presentations

Slides for our TheWebConf 2023 paper on entities' retrievability. video 🎬.
Slides for our ECIR 2022 paper on query variations. video 🎬.

academic services

  • Reviewer for ECIR (19, 20, 21, 22, 23), CIKM (19, 21, 22, 23), SIGIR (21, 22, 23), RecSys (21, 22, 23), TheWebConf (20,23), MICROS'21, CHIIR'22 and CUI'22.
  • Organizer at the Delft eXplainable AI Summer School 2022 (XAISS).
  • Organizer at Search-Oriented Conversatinal AI workshop (SCAI) at SIGIR'22.

one page cv