The Research day starts at 16.15 at the Department of Informatics. My adviser Prof. Abraham Bernstein opens the session with his talk on “Dem Gehirn beim Denken zusehen – Wie die Informatik neue Welten erschliesst”. Afterwards, all people present their current work on posters. Everyone will be open for questions and discussions.

I’ll participate and will present two different posters. One poster is about a distributed collaborative recommender system approach. My second poster is about a , OMORE, a Firefox Add-on that enables cross-site recommendation for movies.

You may find additional informations about the upcoming Research Day. Here you get important information how to reach us.

Distributed Collaborative Recommender System

OMORE - Firefox Add-on for cross-site recommendations

Participants of the IRMLeS workshop

Our current work on a probabilistic approach to compute partial user preference similarities was accepted and published at the 1st International Workshop on Inductive Reasoning and Machine Learning for the Semantic Web (IRMLeS) at the 6th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC) 2009. The paper is available online at CEUR-WS.org as volume 474. The presentation is available at the IRMLeS Web page.

The general idea is that people may share similar preferences only partially. For instance, a person may like Italian food like another person but not Chinese food. But the other person does like Chinese food. Traditional collaborative filtering computes global preference similarity and fail detect this relation. Our approach computes is able to compute partial preference similarities on the basis of hypothesized user preferences. The hypothesized user preferences are learned applying traditional machine learning algorithms. We could show, that our approach performs significantly better then traditional user-based collaborative filtering. Especially in cases where people have only few common rated items. The strength of our approach are the use of partial preference similarities and using hypothesized user preferences instead of item ratings that are always biased.

It was my first real presentation at a conference and it was a great success. I got very positive feedback on it. But I also noticed that a too fancy presentation may irritate some people. Well, I just had the new version of Keynote installed on my Mac and thus, I had to try out the new fancy features. This workshop was one of the most successful at the this year’s ESWC measured by number of participants. I also enjoyed the workshop dinner where I participated interesting discussion on artificial intelligence, data mining in practice, football and Shakespeare.

At the conference, I got in touch with some very interesting people. Especially at the very well organised poster session and after the conference dinner. Unfortunately, it was the last European Semantic Web Conference because the organizers decided to have the industry as main target. Thus, the abbreviation of ESWC stands now for the Extended Semantic Web Conference.

Abstract

Recommender systems play an important role in supporting people getting items they like. One type of recommender systems is user-based collaborative filtering. The fundamental assumption of user-based collaborative filtering is that people who share similar preferences for common items behave similar in the future. The similarity of user preferences is computed globally on common rated items such that partial preference similarities might be missed. Consequently, valuable ratings of partially similar users are ignored. Furthermore, two users may even have similar preferences but the set of common rated items is too small to infer preference similarity. We propose first, an approach that computes user preference similarities based on learned user preference models and second, we propose a method to compute partial user preference similarities based on partial user model similarities. For users with few common rated items, we show that user similarity based on preferences significantly outperforms user similarity based on common rated items.

Presentation

In the following, you can watch my paper presentation I gave at the IRMLeS workshop:

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