Posts Tagged recommendation systems
Project open discussion
Posted by Kristina in Related works on 19th March 2011
Last week we ran an open discussion of our project. The focus group of four people critically evaluated our idea and expressed their opinions how to extend and improve proposed system. Invited reviewers considered presented suggestion tool from different points of view: starting from required functionality and technical details and ending with social, legal and economic aspects. Below is a short description of the most interesting ideas and critics expressed during the meeting.
Idea evaluation
In previous posts (literature survey, existing applications) devoted to a field of interests’ investigation, we published an overview of existing applications and researches related to our initial idea. The survey showed that the demand in the web market and research community for recommendation systems, has led to its mass production in the past few years. Some of these suggestion tools are quite successful (Jinni, Filmaster Blog, Faves for Facebook, etc.) as they provide rich functionality and a good quality of recommendations. However, in this sketch we will differentiate our idea from existing solutions and also outline strengths of the proposed system.
Surfing cyberspace of ideas
Hello everyone! It is the first entry of the “Cybertube” team blog which is designed to trace the development process of an application or, in a more comprehensive sense, a concept for social networking. During the next few months our team will post here ideas, experiences, stories about collaboration within our team, challenges faced and, hopefully, found solutions. Now we are in the beginning of our “journey” nevertheless we already have done some work. We ran a set of “hot” discussion sessions in order to produce an idea which could be useful or entertaining in terms of social networking processes. Having these group meetings (3 sessions) was very productive in the process of coming up with ideas, we were able to complete and extend each other’s thoughts. However, we soon realised that we can lose a lot of useful ideas if we do not keep minutes of our meetings, here we decided to take down the length of our discussion sessions and pay more attention to notes taking.
Discussion Session
These brainstorming activities revealed areas which are potentially very interesting for all members of our team. These are include different sorts of recommendation systems on the base of existing relations between users in social networks as Twitter or Facebook, for example. Moving next we considered an idea of a combination of geo location facilities provided by Facebook with recommender systems that can reinforce the power and flexibility of a suggestion tool. Another area of our interests was focused on statistics gathering and analysis tool which also can be build on top of existing networks and provide a good overview of social networks impact on the information within the cyber society. Moreover, we took into consideration accessibility issues and reflected upon a special network or an add-one for Facebook or MySpace with a fully accessible and simple interface which can be used by people with disabilities.
Brainstorming
In addition to that we started investigating the Social Network API’s in order to see what functionality is provided. More specifically we checked what information can be extracted from Facebook (JavaScript, Android, PHP SDK, graph API, Social Plug-ins) and from Twitter (using the Rest and streaming API). In order to examine described features we implemented one demo for Facebook and a simple application for Android. Screenshots are provided below.
Demo (based on Facebook API)
Demo for Android