Roberto Pagano
PhD - Machine Learning Scientist
About me

Who Am I?

I am a researcher and machine learning practitioner who deals with distributed data processing tools to develop data pipelines and train machine learning models at scale, gathering feedback on them from users from all over the world through Randomized Controlled Trials.

I frequently take the lead in conceiving and implementing new ideas, as well as improving current solutions in the pursuit of a better customer experience.

The exposure to a large scale commercial environment has greatly shaped how I attack a business problem with a Machine Learning approach, considering aspects such as large scale training and serving, training/serving skew, latency optimization, feature productionization, online learning, experimentation, bias, business metrics optimization and tradeoffs.

What Do I do?

Some of my areas of expertise

Ranking

Managing ranking models in a large scale commercial setting affecting users from all over the world, effectively recommending in every destination for every season.

A/B testing

Every change to the ranking model must be beneficial for the customer and it is tested through a Randomized Controlled Trial (A/B testing).

Data Pipelines

Creating and managing tera-scale data pipelines require data engineering skills and a thorough knowledge of big data concepts and tools

Tera-scale learning

Training (and evaluating) a model on tera-scale datasets needs to be distributed over a cluster of machines and often requires out-of-core tools.

Bias Handling

Presentation bias, position bias and user bias all affect ranking data and each one of these needs to be addressed from the modeling side.

Serving

Serving a Machine Learned Ranker to millions of users every day with a latency of milliseconds requires careful design and often tradeoffs in the model design.

Years of experience
Publications
Coffees
Experience

Experience

Senior Machine Learning Scientist - Booking.com 2017 - now

I lead the continuous improvement of the ranking product in pursuit of a smooth, personalized and contextualized user experience. I often find myself pushing for excellence and success by leading, developing and managing data pipelines, training machine learned models, taking care of the productionization of these online learning large scale models, addressing biases, evaluating their quality offline and online through Randomized Controlled Trials for a plethora of business metrics.

PhD Student - Politecnico di Milano 2013-2016

My PhD studies revolve around Recommender Systems. Under the supervision of Professor Paolo Cremonesi I explored several application domains, such as TV, Music, E-tourism, and Job Recommendation. I focused on the importance that context plays in these application domains, exploring algorithms that are actually driven by the context. I was also lecturer for some courses in Politecnico di Milano and presented papers at RecSys and WWW conferences.

My Studies

Education

Politecnico di Milano

Recommender Systems, Machine Learning, Offline Evaluation, Ranking

Thesis: Context Driven Recommender Systems

Politecnico di Milano, Politecnico di Torino, Alta Scuola Politecnica double degree

110/110 cum laude

Thesis: Social Recommender Systems

Università degli Studi Di Palermo

110/110 cum laude

Thesis: Social Recommender Systems

Read

Publications

TOIS | Issue 37 | Vol 2

Top-n recommendation with multi-channel positive feedback using factorization machines

Babak Loni, Roberto Pagano, Martha Larson, Alan Hanjalic

RecSys 2016

The contextual turn: From context-aware to context-driven recommender systems

Roberto Pagano, Paolo Cremonesi, Martha Larson, Balázs Hidasi, Domonkos Tikk, Alexandros Karatzoglou, Massimo Quadrana

RecSys 2016 | RecSys Competition

Multi-stack ensemble for job recommendation

Tommaso Carpi, Marco Edemanti, Ervin Kamberoski, Elena Sacchi, Paolo Cremonesi, Roberto Pagano, and Massimo Quadrana.

RecSys 2015 | Large Scale Recommender Systems Workshop

30Music Listening and Playlists Dataset

Roberto Turrin, Massimo Quadrana, Andrea Condorelli, Roberto Pagano, Paolo Cremonesi

RecSys 2014 | RecSysTV Workshop

Time-based TV programs prediction

Roberto Turrin, Andrea Condorelli, Paolo Cremonesi, Roberto Pagano

Get in Touch

CV & Contact