| (*) Understanding the sources and different types of user-generated data [k2]
Gathering user-generated and other data needed to build a recommender system (e.g., user-item interactions, user side information, item side information, context data) [k3]
Understanding the key concepts and techniques underlying recommender systems, such as user-item interactions, similarity metrics, matrix factorization, and hybridization methods [k2]
Understanding the most common recommendation strategies (e.g., collaborative filtering, content-based filtering, context-aware recommendation), their application domains, and types of data they operate on [k2]
Evaluating recommender systems / content ranking models via accuracy- and beyond-accuracy metrics; deciding which metric is suited for which problem [k5]
Critically reflecting on ethical concerns (e.g., privacy, biases, or fairness issues) in user-generated data and recommender systems [k4]
 | (*) Sources of user-generated data
Tasks, applications, and use cases that leverage user-generated data
Differentiating retrieval, browsing, and recommendation
Foundations of recommender systems (e.g., explicit versus implicit feedback on items, similarity metrics, user-item rating matrix)
Key concepts and methods for collaborative filtering, including memory-based and model-based variants
Key concepts and methods for content-based filtering, focusing on the text modality, including natural language processing methods (casefolding, stemming, lemmatization, stopping, topic modeling)
Key concepts and methods for graph-based recommenders, including graph-based transitivity, and applying techniques from social network mining (edge and node measures)
Strategies to create hybrid recommenders, including parallelized, monolithic, and pipelined designs
Different evaluation strategies for recommender systems (offline testing, online testing, user studies); most important accuracy metrics (e.g., F1, NDCG, MRR, MAP) and beyond-accuracy metrics (e.g., diversity, novelty, coverage)
Personalization, user-awareness, and context-awareness in recommender systems
Psychology-informed recommender systems (cognition-inspired, personality-aware, and affect-aware recommenders) 
Biases and fairness in recommender systems, including categorization of biases, relation to fairness, calibration metrics, and strategies to mitigate harmful biases (pre-, in-, and post-processing)
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