Welcome to the CHI 2006 Extended Abstracts. We hope that you will enjoy this year's extended abstracts and the changes that we have made. For the first time this year, we encouraged submissions from six different sub-communities of the human-computer interaction (HCI) field: design; education; engineering; management; research and usability. The intent was to make sure that the technical program included elements that would be of interest to the broad HCI world. We especially sought Experience Reports, Panels, SIGs, and HCI Overviews. Submissions to each of these were carefully reviewed by the Conference Committee and their respective Community Chairs. These Extended Abstracts include these new or modified venues as well as materials from other traditional CHI venues.

CHI '06 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems

In the era of big data, recommender system (RS) has become an effective information filtering tool that alleviates information overload for Web users. Collaborative filtering (CF), as one of the most successful recommendation techniques, has been widely studied by various research institutions and industries and has been applied in practice. CF makes recommendations for the current active user using lots of users’ historical rating information without analyzing the content of the information resource. However, in recent years, data sparsity and high dimensionality brought by big data have negatively affected the efficiency of the traditional CF-based recommendation approaches. In CF, the context information, such as time information and trust relationships among the friends, is introduced into RS to construct a training model to further improve the recommendation accuracy and user’s satisfaction, and therefore, a variety of hybrid CF-based recommendation algorithms have emerged. In this paper, we mainly review and summarize the traditional CF-based approaches and techniques used in RS and study some recent hybrid CF-based recommendation approaches and techniques, including the latest hybrid memory-based and model-based CF recommendation algorithms. Finally, we discuss the potential impact that may improve the RS and future direction. In this paper, we aim at introducing the recent hybrid CF-based recommendation techniques fusing social networks to solve data sparsity and high dimensionality and provide a novel point of view to improve the performance of RS, thereby presenting a useful resource in the state-of-the-art research result for future researchers.

A Survey of Collaborative Filtering-Based Recommender Systems: From Traditional Methods to Hybrid Methods Based on Social Networks

Automated recommendations have become a ubiquitous part of today’s online user experience. These systems point us to additional items to purchase in online shops, they make suggestions to us on movies to watch, or recommend us people to connect with on social websites. In many of today’s applications, however, the only way for users to interact with the system is to inspect the recommended items. Often, no mechanisms are implemented for users to give the system feedback on the recommendations or to explicitly specify preferences, which can limit the potential overall value of the system for its users. Academic research in recommender systems is largely focused on algorithmic approaches for item selection and ranking. Nonetheless, over the years a variety of proposals were made on how to design more interactive recommenders. This work provides a comprehensive overview on the existing literature on user interaction aspects in recommender systems. We cover existing approaches for preference elicitation and result presentation, as well as proposals that consider recommendation as an interactive process. Throughout the work, we furthermore discuss examples of real-world systems and outline possible directions for future works.

Interacting with Recommenders—Overview and Research Directions

In recent years, the recommendation systems have become increasingly popular and have been used in a broad variety of applications. Here, we investigate the matrix completion techniques for the recommendation systems that are based on collaborative filtering. The collaborative filtering problem can be viewed as predicting the favorability of a user with respect to new items of commodities. When a rating matrix is constructed with users as rows, items as columns, and entries as ratings, the collaborative filtering problem can then be modeled as a matrix completion problem by filling out the unknown elements in the rating matrix. This article presents a comprehensive survey of the matrix completion methods used in recommendation systems. We focus on the mathematical models for matrix completion and the corresponding computational algorithms as well as their characteristics and potential issues. Several applications other than the traditional user-item association prediction are also discussed.

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A Survey of Matrix Completion Methods for Recommendation Systems

Recommendation systems, prevalent in many applications, aim to surface to users the right content at the right time. Recently, researchers have aspired to develop conversational systems that offer seamless interactions with users, more effectively eliciting user preferences and offering better recommendations. Taking a step towards this goal, this paper explores the two stages of a single round of conversation with a user: which question to ask the user, and how to use their feedback to respond with a more accurate recommendation. Following these two stages, first, we detail an RNN-based model for generating topics a user might be interested in, and then extend a state-of-the-art RNN-based video recommender to incorporate the user's selected topic. We describe our proposed system Q&R, i.e., Question & Recommendation, and the surrogate tasks we utilize to bootstrap data for training our models. We evaluate different components of Q&R on live traffic in various applications within YouTube: User Onboarding, Homepage Recommendation, and Notifications. Our results demonstrate that our approach improves upon state-of-the-art recommendation models, including RNNs, and makes these applications more useful, such as a >1% increase in video notifications opened. Further, our design choices can be useful to practitioners wanting to transition to more conversational recommendation systems.

Q&R: A Two-Stage Approach toward Interactive Recommendation

We identify shortcomings of current recommender systems.We present an interactive recommender framework to tackle the shortcomings.We analyze existing interactive recommenders along the dimensions of our framework.Based on the analysis, we identify future research challenges and opportunities. Recommender systems have been researched extensively over the past decades. Whereas several algorithms have been developed and deployed in various application domains, recent research efforts are increasingly oriented towards the user experience of recommender systems. This research goes beyond accuracy of recommendation algorithms and focuses on various human factors that affect acceptance of recommendations, such as user satisfaction, trust, transparency and sense of control. In this paper, we present an interactive visualization framework that combines recommendation with visualization techniques to support human-recommender interaction. Then, we analyze existing interactive recommender systems along the dimensions of our framework, including our work. Based on our survey results, we present future research challenges and opportunities.

Chen He

Papers

Interactive recommender systems