Interactive Grounded Language Understanding in a Collaborative Environment: IGLU 2021

Human intelligence has the remarkable ability to quickly adapt to new tasks and environments. Starting from a very young age, humans acquire new skills and learn how to solve new tasks either by imitating the behavior of others or by following provided natural language instructions. To facilitate research in this direction, we propose \emph{IGLU: Interactive Grounded Language Understanding in a Collaborative Environment}. The primary goal of the competition is to approach the problem of how to build interactive agents that learn to solve a task while provided with grounded natural language instructions in a collaborative environment. Understanding the complexity of the challenge, we split it into sub-tasks to make it feasible for participants.

Aesthetic Features for Personalized Photo Recommendation

Many photography websites such as Flickr, 500px, Unsplash, and Adobe Behance are used by amateur and professional photography enthusiasts. Unlike content-based image search, such users of photography websites are not just looking for photos with certain content, but more generally for photos with a certain photographic "aesthetic". In this context, we explore personalized photo recommendation and propose two aesthetic feature extraction methods based on (i) color space and (ii) deep style transfer embeddings. Using a dataset from 500px, we evaluate how these features can be best leveraged by collaborative filtering methods and show that (ii) provides a significant boost in photo recommendation performance.