139,072 research outputs found
Reciprocal Recommendation System for Online Dating
Online dating sites have become popular platforms for people to look for
potential romantic partners. Different from traditional user-item
recommendations where the goal is to match items (e.g., books, videos, etc)
with a user's interests, a recommendation system for online dating aims to
match people who are mutually interested in and likely to communicate with each
other. We introduce similarity measures that capture the unique features and
characteristics of the online dating network, for example, the interest
similarity between two users if they send messages to same users, and
attractiveness similarity if they receive messages from same users. A
reciprocal score that measures the compatibility between a user and each
potential dating candidate is computed and the recommendation list is generated
to include users with top scores. The performance of our proposed
recommendation system is evaluated on a real-world dataset from a major online
dating site in China. The results show that our recommendation algorithms
significantly outperform previously proposed approaches, and the collaborative
filtering-based algorithms achieve much better performance than content-based
algorithms in both precision and recall. Our results also reveal interesting
behavioral difference between male and female users when it comes to looking
for potential dates. In particular, males tend to be focused on their own
interest and oblivious towards their attractiveness to potential dates, while
females are more conscientious to their own attractiveness to the other side of
the line
Collaborative recommendations with content-based filters for cultural activities via a scalable event distribution platform
Nowadays, most people have limited leisure time and the offer of (cultural) activities to spend this time is enormous. Consequently, picking the most appropriate events becomes increasingly difficult for end-users. This complexity of choice reinforces the necessity of filtering systems that assist users in finding and selecting relevant events. Whereas traditional filtering tools enable e.g. the use of keyword-based or filtered searches, innovative recommender systems draw on user ratings, preferences, and metadata describing the events. Existing collaborative recommendation techniques, developed for suggesting web-shop products or audio-visual content, have difficulties with sparse rating data and can not cope at all with event-specific restrictions like availability, time, and location. Moreover, aggregating, enriching, and distributing these events are additional requisites for an optimal communication channel. In this paper, we propose a highly-scalable event recommendation platform which considers event-specific characteristics. Personal suggestions are generated by an advanced collaborative filtering algorithm, which is more robust on sparse data by extending user profiles with presumable future consumptions. The events, which are described using an RDF/OWL representation of the EventsML-G2 standard, are categorized and enriched via smart indexing and open linked data sets. This metadata model enables additional content-based filters, which consider event-specific characteristics, on the recommendation list. The integration of these different functionalities is realized by a scalable and extendable bus architecture. Finally, focus group conversations were organized with external experts, cultural mediators, and potential end-users to evaluate the event distribution platform and investigate the possible added value of recommendations for cultural participation
Data Portraits and Intermediary Topics: Encouraging Exploration of Politically Diverse Profiles
In micro-blogging platforms, people connect and interact with others.
However, due to cognitive biases, they tend to interact with like-minded people
and read agreeable information only. Many efforts to make people connect with
those who think differently have not worked well. In this paper, we
hypothesize, first, that previous approaches have not worked because they have
been direct -- they have tried to explicitly connect people with those having
opposing views on sensitive issues. Second, that neither recommendation or
presentation of information by themselves are enough to encourage behavioral
change. We propose a platform that mixes a recommender algorithm and a
visualization-based user interface to explore recommendations. It recommends
politically diverse profiles in terms of distance of latent topics, and
displays those recommendations in a visual representation of each user's
personal content. We performed an "in the wild" evaluation of this platform,
and found that people explored more recommendations when using a biased
algorithm instead of ours. In line with our hypothesis, we also found that the
mixture of our recommender algorithm and our user interface, allowed
politically interested users to exhibit an unbiased exploration of the
recommended profiles. Finally, our results contribute insights in two aspects:
first, which individual differences are important when designing platforms
aimed at behavioral change; and second, which algorithms and user interfaces
should be mixed to help users avoid cognitive mechanisms that lead to biased
behavior.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures. To be presented at ACM Intelligent User
Interfaces 201
Trust-Networks in Recommender Systems
Similarity-based recommender systems suffer from significant limitations, such as data sparseness and scalability. The goal of this research is to improve recommender systems by incorporating the social concepts of trust and reputation. By introducing a trust model we can improve the quality and accuracy of the recommended items. Three trust-based recommendation strategies are presented and evaluated against the popular MovieLens [8] dataset
Context-Aware Systems for Sequential Item Recommendation
Quizlet is the most popular online learning tool in the United States, and is
used by over 2/3 of high school students, and 1/2 of college students. With
more than 95% of Quizlet users reporting improved grades as a result, the
platform has become the de-facto tool used in millions of classrooms. In this
paper, we explore the task of recommending suitable content for a student to
study, given their prior interests, as well as what their peers are studying.
We propose a novel approach, i.e. Neural Educational Recommendation Engine
(NERE), to recommend educational content by leveraging student behaviors rather
than ratings. We have found that this approach better captures social factors
that are more aligned with learning. NERE is based on a recurrent neural
network that includes collaborative and content-based approaches for
recommendation, and takes into account any particular student's speed, mastery,
and experience to recommend the appropriate task. We train NERE by jointly
learning the user embeddings and content embeddings, and attempt to predict the
content embedding for the final timestamp. We also develop a confidence
estimator for our neural network, which is a crucial requirement for
productionizing this model. We apply NERE to Quizlet's proprietary dataset, and
present our results. We achieved an R^2 score of 0.81 in the content embedding
space, and a recall score of 54% on our 100 nearest neighbors. This vastly
exceeds the recall@100 score of 12% that a standard matrix-factorization
approach provides. We conclude with a discussion on how NERE will be deployed,
and position our work as one of the first educational recommender systems for
the K-12 space
Hierarchical Attention Network for Visually-aware Food Recommendation
Food recommender systems play an important role in assisting users to
identify the desired food to eat. Deciding what food to eat is a complex and
multi-faceted process, which is influenced by many factors such as the
ingredients, appearance of the recipe, the user's personal preference on food,
and various contexts like what had been eaten in the past meals. In this work,
we formulate the food recommendation problem as predicting user preference on
recipes based on three key factors that determine a user's choice on food,
namely, 1) the user's (and other users') history; 2) the ingredients of a
recipe; and 3) the descriptive image of a recipe. To address this challenging
problem, we develop a dedicated neural network based solution Hierarchical
Attention based Food Recommendation (HAFR) which is capable of: 1) capturing
the collaborative filtering effect like what similar users tend to eat; 2)
inferring a user's preference at the ingredient level; and 3) learning user
preference from the recipe's visual images. To evaluate our proposed method, we
construct a large-scale dataset consisting of millions of ratings from
AllRecipes.com. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms several
competing recommender solutions like Factorization Machine and Visual Bayesian
Personalized Ranking with an average improvement of 12%, offering promising
results in predicting user preference for food. Codes and dataset will be
released upon acceptance
Service-Learning Community Partner Impact Assessment Report
In the summer of 2017, VCU’s Office of Service-Learning conducted an evaluation of the impact of service-learning on community partner organizations. This assessment aimed to collect actionable feedback from partners and to inform improvements to service-learning courses at VCU that successfully address partners’ concerns. An external researcher conducted phone interviews with a representative sample of 22 community partners. Partners were asked how a specific service-learning course impacted their organization in three areas: organizational capacity, economically, and socially. Partners were also asked about faculty interactions and the likelihood of recommending the service-learning course to other organizations like their own. This report presents the findings of this community partner impact assessment, outlines an assessment model for a three-year continuous improvement cycle, and offers key recommendations and next steps that emerged from this assessment
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