The last decade has witnessed a tremendous growth
in the volume as well as the diversity of multimedia content
generated by a multitude of sources (news agencies, social media,
etc.). Faced with a variety of content choices, consumers are
exhibiting diverse preferences for content; their preferences often
depend on the context in which they consume content as well as
various exogenous events. To satisfy the consumers’ demand for
such diverse content, multimedia content aggregators (CAs) have
emerged which gather content from numerous multimedia sources.
A key challenge for such systems is to accurately predict what
type of content each of its consumers prefers in a certain context,
and adapt these predictions to the evolving consumers’
preferences, contexts, and content characteristics. We propose
a novel, distributed, online multimedia content aggregation
framework, which gathers content generated by multiple
heterogeneous producers to fulfill its consumers’ demand for
content. Since both the multimedia content characteristics and the
consumers’ preferences and contexts are unknown, the optimal
content aggregation strategy is unknown a priori. Our proposed
content aggregation algorithm is able to learn online what content
to gather and how to match content and users by exploiting
similarities between consumer types. We prove bounds for our
proposed learning algorithms that guarantee both the accuracy
of the predictions as well as the learning speed. Importantly, our
algorithms operate efficiently even when feedback from consumers
is missing or content and preferences evolve over time. Illustrative
results highlight the merits of the proposed content aggregation
system in a variety of settings