Richard Anarfi

Building the Modern Services Industry

Richard Anarfi is a PhD candidate working under the supervision of Dr. Kenneth K. Fletcher, the director of the Services Computing Lab in the Computer Science Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He obtained his Bachelor's degree in Electrical/Electronic Engineering from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana after which he worked as Electrical/Automation Engineer in the fast-moving consumer goods industry. His research interests involve exploring the use reinforcement learning to improve the accuracy and diversity of personalized recommender systems. By incorporating natural language processing tasks of topic extraction and word embeddings, his research seeks to capture user dynamic preferences on item or service consumption for personalized recommendations by a recommender agent.