PAWS Meeting 11/18/2008

Rosta and Dhruba presented some papers from RecSys and InfoVis this year.

RecSys (Rosta)

• Who predicts better? - talks about whether impersonal recommender systems perform as human recommenders
• Crafting initial user experience to achieve community goals - talks about the new user activities of recommender systems, including how many new users they lose, how much users will users do, how can they shape ongoing user behavior, etc. 
• Recommending topics for self descriptions in online user profiles - talks about the user profiles ("about you" entries) in social network sites.

InfoVis (Dhruba)

• VisGets - a temporal + geographic + tag cloud visualization system for blog and news on the Web.
• Rolling the dice - the best paper of InfoVis '08. Showed high dimensional data visualization.
• Who votes for what - an interactive canvas formulating queries (SQL).  Adopts a radial visualization that users can do activities like adding, removing variables, and specifying  values visually.