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

Guiding Us Throughout a Sea of Data - A Survey on Recommender Systems and Its Privacy Challenges

Over the past decades, the Internet has served as the backbone connecting people to others, places and things. With the sheer volume of information generated everyday, people can feel overwhelmed when having to make a selection among the multiple options that normally come up after a search or application request. For example, when searching for news articles regarding a particular topic, the search engine will present a number of results to you. When looking for some product on shopping websites, there are usually several pages of results that match the keywords. It can be very challenging for people to find their most expected information in the era of big data. A recommender system is a program that utilizes algorithms to learn users’ preferences from historical data, and predict their future interests. Recommender systems are employed everywhere in the cyberspace. Many websites including Amazon, eBay, YouTube, Facebook, Netflix, and others, have integrated automatic personalized recommendation techniques into their systems, in order to help users find their most desired information. While recommender systems have become a common feature on most web applications and sites, one of the major issues around its use is privacy concerns. A regular recommender system requires the users to share their online behavior data, such as their past shopping records, browsing history, visited places, so that it can learn their preferences. This can potentially deter people from using the system because these data are considered as users’ privacy and many do not feel comfortable sharing the information with other parties. In this research, we studied several recommendation algorithms, and compared their performance as well as prediction accuracy on real-world datasets. We also proposed a novel nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) based privacy-preserving point-of-interest recommendation framework, in which the latent factors in NMF are learned on user group preference instead of individual user preference. Recommendations are made by personalizing the group preference on user’s local devices. There are no location or check-in data collected from the users anywhere throughout the learning and recommendation processes. Some preliminary results on a regular recommender system were established and two GUI applications were developed. The on-going research focuses on integrating the privacy-preserving framework into the system and verifying the effectiveness as well as the recommendation accuracy of the proposed model

Recommendation System for News Reader

Recommendation Systems help users to find information and make decisions where they lack the required knowledge to judge a particular product. Also, the information dataset available can be huge and recommendation systems help in filtering this data according to users‟ needs. Recommendation systems can be used in various different ways to facilitate its users with effective information sorting. For a person who loves reading, this paper presents the research and implementation of a Recommendation System for a NewsReader Application using Android Platform. The NewsReader Application proactively recommends news articles as per the reading habits of the user, recorded over a period of time and also recommends the currently trending articles. Recommendation systems and their implementations using various algorithms is the primary area of study for this project. This research paper compares and details popular recommendation algorithms viz. Content based recommendation systems, Collaborative recommendation systems etc. Moreover, it also presents a more efficient Hybrid approach that absorbs the best aspects from both the algorithms mentioned above, while trying to eliminate all the potential drawbacks observed

Removing the Digital Divide for Senior Web Users

It is hard for the elderly to use the internet to find the resource they want. Usually help is needed for them to complete the task on the technology things. The main reason for this project is to research ideas on encourage senior people to make use of the web to locate helps they want, such as finding volunteers and professional helps. The scope of this project is to develop a new way of web access and content presentation methodologies that let senior people getting help from volunteers and various service providers more easily that incorporates social networking technology e.g. Facebook. By incorporating the social network web site like Facebook into the web application, senior people will be able to find volunteering help or other related service providers through social networking. Volunteers will show up in Google map in search results for senior to easily locate helps. Senior people can also search for self help videos tutorials through the web application search engine. A mobile version of the senior user application will also be developed for easy access on the road. Other features that benefit senior users includes voice input, control / content posting and collaborative social networking where a sponsors would sponsor a help task volunteer undertake