Portrait of Nediyana Daskalova

Nediyana Daskalova

I study how people create with AI, and I help decide what gets built.

Head of UX Research at Suno, in New York. I work on generative AI, personalization, and AI evaluation.

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About

I lead human-AI interaction research at Suno, where people make music with AI. I joined in March 2024, when we were fewer than 20 people, built the UX research team (five people so far), and work with the founders and product team on what we build next and how we know it's working.

Before that I spent three and a half years as a research scientist at Spotify, working on the AI DJ and on music and podcast recommendations, and did a PhD in computer science at Brown.

The idea behind my work started in that PhD, where I built apps that helped people run experiments on their own sleep. I call it guided agency: the system does the hard part, and people still steer. I wrote more about it in What is guided agency?

I saw it again at Spotify with TastePaths, a map of a music genre. Listeners liked it best when it started from artists they already knew, and they asked to grow and prune the map themselves.

Selected papers

  1. GoalPods: Enabling Goal-Focused Exploration of Podcasts in Interactive Recommender Systems IUI 2023
  2. TastePaths: Enabling Deeper Exploration and Understanding of Personal Preferences in Recommender Systems IUI 2022
  3. SleepBandits: Guided Flexible Self-Experiments for Sleep CHI 2020

Full list on Google Scholar

Contact

If you want to talk, I'm on LinkedIn.

My team is hiring senior UX researchers in New York and Los Angeles.