PAWS Meeting 10-12-07

"Developing Recommendation Systems Using IC-Service" presented by Aliaksandr Birukou

Aliaksandr is a visiting scholar from University of Trento, department of information and technology, part of a research group doing the research in intelligent information processing, and software engineering. Aliaksandr's work focuses on intelligent information processing.

This talk was focused on his project on "Implicit Culture". The main idea is helping human or artificial agents to grasp group's culture of the community since the knowledge of the communities is often implicit.

Implicit culture framework is built to encourage desired behavior of the members of communities by observing what the members of the community do, extracting their actions and suggesting appropriate action to others.

They have developed a system called IC-Service that he discussed in some details in the presentation. The system provides recommendation service in any domain. Every new domain only needs to be defined in terms of agents, actions, objects, attributes and the community culture. The community culture is defined as a set of rules. IC-Service The system is open source.

Aliaksandr provided an example of IC-service in "web service" recommendation in this talk. This is a very different domain than usual recommendation application which is somehow recommending services to application plus humans. The domain brings some challenges for evaluation. The main goal here is recommending services that have been selected by others for similar requests. The evaluation of the system is done through simulation.

We had some discussion about the evaluation methodology that the real community behavior cannot be simulated and the simulation assumes perfect behavior of the community. We also had some discussion about the difference of "implicit culture" and "social navigation" which implicit culture can be much more general focusing on all kinds of behavior of a community while social navigation focuses on navigational behaviors. However, examples given by Aliaksandr are more in the overlap part of implicit culture and social navigation.

PAWS Meeting 10-05-07

The IUI '07 paper "From social bookmarking to social summarization: an experiment in community-based summary generation" by Oisin Boydell and Barry Smyth
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1216295.1216311
presented by Sharon.

Nice paper. Several interesting ideas.
Authors try to generate web-page summaries based on the social tags from del.icio.us
Tags and web-pages themselves are used as input queries for the Lucene snipet generator. The resulting snipets are analyzed and combined to generate a summary of a page.
Four experiment have been done:
1st Experiment compared the closeness of socially-generated summaries to the summaries provided by people on del.icio.us.
2nd experiment explored the relation between the quality and the length of social summaries
3d experiment analyzed how the quality of a summary would depend on the number of tags available for the page
finally, in the fourth experiment authors tried to generate the community-focused social summaries.