Beyond Personalization: Research Directions in Multistakeholder Recommendation

Recommender systems are personalized information access applications; they are ubiquitous in today's online environment, and effective at finding items that meet user needs and tastes. As the reach of recommender systems has extended, it has become apparent that the single-minded focus on the user common to academic research has obscured other important aspects of recommendation outcomes. Properties such as fairness, balance, profitability, and reciprocity are not captured by typical metrics for recommender system evaluation. The concept of multistakeholder recommendation has emerged as a unifying framework for describing and understanding recommendation settings where the end user is not the sole focus. This article describes the origins of multistakeholder recommendation, and the landscape of system designs. It provides illustrative examples of current research, as well as outlining open questions and research directions for the field.Comment: 64 page

Geoportals: an internet marketing perspective

A geoportal is a web site that presents an entry point to geo-products (including geo-data) on the web. Despite their importance in (spatial) data infrastructures, literature suggest stagnating or even declining trends in visitor numbers. In this paper relevant ideas and techniques for improving performance are derived from internet marketing literature. We tested the extent to which these ideas are already applied in practice through a survey among 48 geoportals worldwide. Results show in many cases positive correlation with trends in visitor numbers. The ideas can be useful for geoportal managers developing their marketing strateg

Recomended for You: The Impact of Profit Incentives on the Relevance of Online Recommendations

Recommender systems are commonly used by Internet firms to improve consumers’ shopping experience and increase firm sales and profits. A large stream of work on recommender design has studied the problem of identifying the most relevant items to recommend to users. In parallel, recent empirical work has started to provide evidence that real-world recommenders contribute to increased sales and profitability for the firms. However, maximizing consumer welfare and firm profit are not the same. Given that recommenders impact sales and profits, a natural question is what is the impact of firm’s profit incentives on recommender design? This paper studies optimal recommender design in a profit-maximizing framework to answer the question and identifies the conditions under which a profit-maximizing recommender recommends the item with highest margins and those under which it recommends the most relevant item. We further elaborate on the social cost of the mismatch between consumer and firm incentives

Accelerating Scientific Discovery by Formulating Grand Scientific Challenges

One important question for science and society is how to best promote scientific progress. Inspired by the great success of Hilbert's famous set of problems, the FuturICT project tries to stimulate and focus the efforts of many scientists by formulating Grand Challenges, i.e. a set of fundamental, relevant and hardly solvable scientific questions.Comment: To appear in EPJ Special Topics. For related work see http://www.futurict.eu and http://www.soms.ethz.c

Exploring personality-targeted UI design in online social participation systems

We present a theoretical foundation and empirical findings demonstrating the effectiveness of personality-targeted design. Much like a medical treatment applied to a person based on his specific genetic profile, we argue that theory-driven, personality-targeted UI design can be more effective than design applied to the entire population. The empirical exploration focused on two settings, two populations and two personality traits: Study 1 shows that users' extroversion level moderates the relationship between the UI cue of audience size and users' contribution. Study 2 demonstrates that the effectiveness of social anchors in encouraging online contributions depends on users' level of emotional stability. Taken together, the findings demonstrate the potential and robustness of the interactionist approach to UI design. The findings contribute to the HCI community, and in particular to designers of social systems, by providing guidelines to targeted design that can increase online participation. Copyright © 2013 ACM