REFER

REsearch in FiltEring and Recommender systems

Note: This page is located at http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~alvarez/REFER/.

REFER is a research group in the CS department at WPI. The members of REFER share interests in issues relevant to the design and analysis of personalized information systems that recommend items of potential interest to their users on the basis of descriptions of these items ("content") as well as social ("collaborative") information about the relations between different users' tastes. Here are some examples of such systems. Some general papers on collaborative filtering are also available here.

Members

Sergio A. Alvarez
Lee Becker
David Brown
Mark Claypool
     

REFER Seminar

Meetings: biweekly in the Beckett conference room, Fuller Labs 246, Mondays at 1 pm.
Coordinator: Sergio A. Alvarez

Fall 1999 Schedule

Date Speaker Topic
Sept. 13 Organizational meeting
Sept. 27 Mark Claypool "Combining Content-Based and Collaborative Filters in an Online Newspaper", by Mark Claypool, Anuja Gokhale, Tim Miranda, Pavel Murnikov, Dmitry Netes, Matthew Sartin
  • abstract is available here
  • full paper is available in gzipped Postscript format here
Oct. 11 Mark Claypool, Lee Becker Overview of the ACM SIGIR'99 Workshop on Recommender Systems: Algorithms and Evaluation (speaker: Mark Claypool), plus discussion (led by Lee Becker) of a paper from the IJCAI'99 Workshop: Automatically Labeling Web Pages Based on Normal User Actions, by Jeremy Goecks and Jude Shavlik.
Oct. 25 No meeting
Nov. 8 Mark Claypool, Dave Brown "Implicit Interest Indicators" or "I's Cube"
  • abstract is available here
Nov. 22 Dave Markle
Dec. 6 Sergio Alvarez Discussion of the paper "Improvement of Combination Information Filtering Method Based on Reliabilities" by Y. Ariyoshi, IJCAI '99 Workshop on Machine Learning for Information Filtering
  • full paper is available in gzipped Postscript format here
Archive: Spring 1999 Schedule

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Applications of recommender/personalization technology

Adaptive web browsing

WebWatcher and Personal WebWatcher

Book recommendation

amazon.com

Personalized news media

CNN
LA Times

Commercial recommender/personalization systems

Gustos
LikeMinds
Net Perceptions

Papers
U. Shardanand, P. Maes. Social Information Filtering: Algorithms for Automating "Word of Mouth", Proceedings of CHI'95 (Human Factors in Computing Systems), 210-217
P. Resnick, N. Iacovou, M. Suchak, P. Bergstrom, J. Riedl. GroupLens: an open architecture for collaborative filtering of netnews, in: CSCW '94. Proceedings of the conference on Computer supported cooperative work, pages 175-186

General Links

UC Berkeley Collaborative Filtering Resources Page