Recommenders for Commerce, Content, and Community

Speaker
John Riedl
Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Minnesota

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

Recommender systems are ubiquitous on the Internet for helping sell products—everything from automobiles to zebras (stuffed, anyway). Novel applications are emerging that use recommenders for non-Internet applications, and that apply them to the problems of distributing content on the Internet and to developing online communities. One of the challenges in successful communities is helping people find relevant information and other people to connect with. We will examine new applications of recommenders, including the algorithms that underlie them, the interfaces for presenting the recommendations, the best practices for deploying them—and the easiest ways to get a recommender system badly wrong. We will discuss some of the most important active research areas in recommender systems. Along the way we will consider issues of how to build a recommender community from scratch, group recommendations, and consumer privacy.

Speaker's Bio

John Riedl has been a member of the faculty of the computer science department of the University of Minnesota since March 1990. In 1992 he co-founded the GroupLens Research project on collaborative information filtering, and has been co-directing it since. In 1996 he co-founded Net Perceptions to commercialize GroupLens. Net Perceptions was the leading recommender systems company during the Internet boom. In 1999, John and other Net Perceptions co-founders shared the MIT Sloan School’s award for E-Commerce Technology. They also shared the World Technology Award for being judged among the individual leaders worldwide who most contributed to the advance of emerging technologies for the benefit of business and society.

John received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Notre Dame in 1983. He earned a master’s degree in computer science in 1985 and a doctorate in computer science in 1990 from Purdue University. He is presently Professor at the University of Minnesota.

Speaker's Website
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~riedl/

Host
Sara Kiesler