SNA-Based Recommendation in Professional Learning Environments

Recommender systems can provide effective means to support self-organization and networking in professional learning environments. In this paper, we leverage social network analysis (SNA) methods to improve interest-based recommendation in professional learning networks. We discuss two approaches for interest-based recommendation using SNA and compare them with conventional collaborative filtering (CF)-based recommendation methods. The user evaluation results based on the ResQue framework confirm that SNA-based CF recommendation outperform traditional CF methods in terms of coverage and thus can provide an effective solution to the sparsity and cold start problems in recommender systems

RECOMMENDATION SYSTEM USING COLLABORATIVE FILTERING

Collaborative filtering is one of the well known and most extensive techniques in recommendation system its basic idea is to predict which items a user would be interested in based on their preferences. Recommendation systems using collaborative filtering are able to provide an accurate prediction when enough data is provided, because this technique is based on the user’s preference. User-based collaborative filtering has been very successful in the past to predict the customer’s behavior as the most important part of the recommendation system. However, their widespread use has revealed some real challenges, such as data sparsity and data scalability, with gradually increasing the number of users and items. To improve the execution time and accuracy of the prediction problem, this paper proposed item-based collaborative filtering applying dimension reduction in a recommendation system. It demonstrates that the proposed approach can achieve better performance and execution time for the recommendation system in terms of existing challenges, according to evaluation metrics using Mean Absolute Error (MAE)

THE USE OF RECOMMENDER SYSTEMS IN WEB APPLICATIONS – THE TROI CASE

Avoiding digital marketing, surveys, reviews and online users behavior approaches on digital age are the key elements for a powerful businesses to fail, there are some systems that should preceded some artificial intelligence techniques. In this direction, the use of data mining for recommending relevant items as a new state of the art technique is increasing user satisfaction as well as the business revenues. And other related information gathering approaches in order to our systems thing and acts like humans. To do so there is a Recommender System that will be elaborated in this thesis. How people interact, how to calculate accurately and identify what people like or dislike based on their online previous behaviors. The thesis includes also the methodologies recommender system uses, how math equations helps Recommender Systems to calculate user’s behavior and similarities. The filters are important on Recommender System, explaining if similar users like the same product or item, which is the probability of neighbor user to like also. Here comes collaborative filters, neighborhood filters, hybrid recommender system with the use of various algorithms the Recommender Systems has the ability to predict whether a particular user would prefer an item or not, based on the user’s profile and their activities. The use of Recommender Systems are beneficial to both service providers and users. Thesis cover also the strength and weaknesses of Recommender Systems and how involving Ontology can improve it. Ontology-based methods can be used to reduce problems that content-based recommender systems are known to suffer from. Based on Kosovar’s GDP and youngsters job perspectives are desirable for improvements, the demand is greater than the offer. I thought of building an intelligence system that will be making easier for Kosovars to find the appropriate job that suits their profile, skills, knowledge, character and locations. And that system is called TROI Search engine that indexes and merge all local operating job seeking websites in one platform with intelligence features. Thesis will present the design, implementation, testing and evaluation of a TROI search engine. Testing is done by getting user experiments while using running environment of TROI search engine. Results show that the functionality of the recommender system is satisfactory and helpful

A Tale of Two Data-Intensive Paradigms: Applications, Abstractions, and Architectures

Scientific problems that depend on processing large amounts of data require overcoming challenges in multiple areas: managing large-scale data distribution, co-placement and scheduling of data with compute resources, and storing and transferring large volumes of data. We analyze the ecosystems of the two prominent paradigms for data-intensive applications, hereafter referred to as the high-performance computing and the Apache-Hadoop paradigm. We propose a basis, common terminology and functional factors upon which to analyze the two approaches of both paradigms. We discuss the concept of "Big Data Ogres" and their facets as means of understanding and characterizing the most common application workloads found across the two paradigms. We then discuss the salient features of the two paradigms, and compare and contrast the two approaches. Specifically, we examine common implementation/approaches of these paradigms, shed light upon the reasons for their current "architecture" and discuss some typical workloads that utilize them. In spite of the significant software distinctions, we believe there is architectural similarity. We discuss the potential integration of different implementations, across the different levels and components. Our comparison progresses from a fully qualitative examination of the two paradigms, to a semi-quantitative methodology. We use a simple and broadly used Ogre (K-means clustering), characterize its performance on a range of representative platforms, covering several implementations from both paradigms. Our experiments provide an insight into the relative strengths of the two paradigms. We propose that the set of Ogres will serve as a benchmark to evaluate the two paradigms along different dimensions.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure

Personalized large scale classification of public tenders on hadoop

Ce projet a été réalisé dans le cadre d’un partenariat entre Fujitsu Canada et Université Laval. Les besoins du projets ont été centrés sur une problématique d’affaire définie conjointement avec Fujitsu. Le projet consistait à classifier un corpus d’appels d’offres électroniques avec une approche orienté big data. L’objectif était d’identifier avec un très fort rappel les offres pertinentes au domaine d’affaire de l’entreprise. Après une séries d’expérimentations à petite échelle qui nous ont permise d’illustrer empiriquement (93% de rappel) l’efficacité de notre approche basé sur l’algorithme BNS (Bi-Normal Separation), nous avons implanté un système complet qui exploite l’infrastructure technologique big data Hadoop. Nos expérimentations sur le système complet démontrent qu’il est possible d’obtenir une performance de classification tout aussi efficace à grande échelle (91% de rappel) tout en exploitant les gains de performance rendus possible par l’architecture distribuée de Hadoop.This project was completed as part of an innovation partnership with Fujitsu Canada and Université Laval. The needs and objectives of the project were centered on a business problem defined jointly with Fujitsu. Our project aimed to classify a corpus of electronic public tenders based on state of the art Hadoop big data technology. The objective was to identify with high recall public tenders relevant to the IT services business of Fujitsu Canada. A small scale prototype based on the BNS algorithm (Bi-Normal Separation) was empirically shown to classify with high recall (93%) the public tender corpus. The prototype was then re-implemented on a full scale Hadoop cluster using Apache Pig for the data preparation pipeline and using Apache Mahout for classification. Our experimentation show that the large scale system not only maintains high recall (91%) on the classification task, but can readily take advantage of the massive scalability gains made possible by Hadoop’s distributed architecture

MLI: An API for Distributed Machine Learning

MLI is an Application Programming Interface designed to address the challenges of building Machine Learn- ing algorithms in a distributed setting based on data-centric computing. Its primary goal is to simplify the development of high-performance, scalable, distributed algorithms. Our initial results show that, relative to existing systems, this interface can be used to build distributed implementations of a wide variety of common Machine Learning algorithms with minimal complexity and highly competitive performance and scalability

CHESTNUT: Improve serendipity in movie recommendation by an Information Theory-based collaborative filtering approach

The term serendipity has been understood narrowly in the Recommender System. Applying a user-centered approach, user-friendly serendipitous recommender systems are expected to be developed based on a good understanding of serendipity. In this paper, we introduce CHESTNUT , a memory-based movie collaborative filtering system to improve serendipity performance. Relying on a proposed Information Theory-based algorithm and previous study, we demonstrate a method of successfully injecting insight, unexpectedness and usefulness, which are key metrics for a more comprehensive understanding of serendipity, into a practical serendipitous runtime system. With lightweight experiments, we have revealed a few runtime issues and further optimized the same. We have evaluated CHESTNUT in both practicability and effectiveness , and the results show that it is fast, scalable and improves serendip-ity performance significantly, compared with mainstream memory-based collaborative filtering. The source codes of CHESTNUT are online at https://github.com/unnc-idl-ucc/CHESTNUT/