Mounia Lalmas is a Director of Research at Spotify, and the Head of Tech Research in Personalisation, where she leads an interdisciplinary team of research scientists, working on personalization and discovery. Mounia also holds an honorary professorship at University College London. Before that, she was a Director of Research at Yahoo, where she led a team of researchers working on advertising quality for Gemini, Yahoo native advertising platform. 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.

She co-led the Evaluation Initiative for XML Retrieval (INEX), a large-scale project with over 80 participating organizations worldwide, which was responsible for defining the nature of XML retrieval, and how it should be evaluated. Since 2011, her work has focused on studying user engagement in areas such as native advertising, digital media, user generated content, search, and now audio (music and talk). She has given numerous talks and tutorials on these and related topics. She is regularly a senior programme committee member at conferences such as WSDM, WWW and SIGIR. She was co-programme chair for SIGIR 2015, WWW 2018 and WSDM 2020. She is also the co-author of a book written as the outcome of her WWW 2013 tutorial on “Measuring User Engagement”.

This is her blog, where she talks about her own research, in a way that she hopes will make it accessible to all.

Photo credit: mathias-erhart (Creative Commons BY).