Profile

Niranjan Pedanekar is the Head of Data Science at Sony Research. He was formerly a Chief Scientist and Distinguished Engineer at TCS Research. He holds a Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University. He has more than 25 years of experience in applying AI and Data Science to a variety of domains, such as media and entertainment, education, transportation, manufacturing, defense, and IT. Niranjan is also a theatre playwright-director-actor, and has written, adapted, or translated more than 20 plays. He would like this aspect of his creative work to be reflected in his research.

Message

My current research interests include recommender systems, short-form videos, and user engagement foundation models. The eventual goal of this research is to be able to continually predict and increase the engagement of an individual on online entertainment platforms.

Publications

LLM-BRec: Personalizing Session-based Social Recommendation with LLM-BERT Fusion Framework

SIGIR, 2024
Raksha Jalan, Tushar Prakash, Niranjan Pedanekar*

Recommendation models enhance online user engagement by suggesting personalized content, boosting satisfaction and retention. Session-based Recommender systems (SR) have become a significant approach, focusing on capturing users' short-term preferences for more accurate reco…

Optimizing Movie Selections: A Multi-Task, Multi-Modal Framework with Strategies for Missing Modality Challenges

SAC, 2024
Subham Raj*, Pawan Agrawal*, Sriparna Saha*, Brijraj Singh*, Niranjan Pedanekar*

Online recommendation systems have become a crucial feature of Over-the-Top (OTT) platforms, which provide streaming media content over the internet. OTT platforms, such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime, use recommendation systems to suggest movies, TV shows, and other con…