HONG KONG BAPTIST UNIVERSITY
FACULTY OF SCIENCE

Department of Computer Science Seminar
2009 Series

Advanced Recommendation Technologies in Web 2.0 - Part II: Basic Recommender Methods

Dr. Chen Li
Department of Computer Science
Hong Kong Baptist University

Date: April 9, 2009 (Thursday)
Time: 4:30 - 5:30 pm
Venue: RRS905, Sir Run Run Shaw Building, Ho Sin Hang Campus

Abstract
A series of four seminars will be given to graduate students and academic staff who are interested in the advance technologies for Web-based recommender systems. As the internet has evolved into its second generation where products are becoming more complex with increasing amount and descriptive features, the task of searching and locating a desired item appears to be too daunting for the average user. Thus, more effort has been made in recent years to develop intelligent information agents, such as the recommender system, with the purpose of efficiently discovering interesting items among the overwhelming information and recommending to the users so as to reduce his/her own searching effort. Therefore, the objectives of these seminars are to introduce how the recommender systems have been developed based on existing machine learning and data mining techniques, different approaches’ pros and cons, their performance measurement standards, and various user issues such as users’ preference elicitation/modeling, interface design and user-evaluation methodologies. It is expected that they will inspire the audience’s interests in certain research subjects and even be helpful for their projects at hand regarding the underlying general-purpose computational methods. Continuing from the first talk, this seminar (Part II) will introduce in-depth how machine-learning algorithms have been employed and extended to realize the basic recommender methods, such as the collaborative filtering and content-based approaches. Other core computational techniques will be also presented, including knowledge-based and utility-based systems. Each method’s strength and disadvantage are to be discussed, along with the commonly accepted standards to assess the performance.

Biography
Dr. Li CHEN has joined the Department of Computer Science at Hong Kong Baptist University in March 2009 as an assistant professor. Before that, she had been a research assistant in the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) group at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) since 2003. She obtained her Doctoral degree (nominated for the Best PhD Thesis Award) in Computer Science at EPFL, Switzerland in July 2008, and Bachelor and Master Degrees (both with excellent academic honors) at Peking University, China respectively in 2000 and 2003. Her research interests have been mainly in the areas of human-computer interaction, user-centered design and development of intelligent Web technologies, recommender systems and e-commerce information agents. She has authored and co-authored a number of publications appearing in high-quality journals (e.g. UMUAI, AI Magazine, ECRJ, KBS) and leading conferences on e-commerce, artificial intelligence, intelligent user interfaces, user modeling and recommender systems (such as ACM EC, AAAI, IUI, UM, ACM RecSys). She won the “Best Student Paper Award” in 2007 at the International Conference on User Modeling. She has also been invited to serve in a number of journals and conferences as reviewer or PC member (IJEC, TOCHI, IEEE IS, UM, IUI, ACM RecSys, ACM EC, etc.).

********* ALL INTERESTED ARE WELCOME ***********
(For enquiry, please contact Computer Science Department at 3411 2385)

http://www.comp.hkbu.edu.hk/v1/?page=seminars&id=12&lang=tc
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