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.