Archive for June, 2007

Google News Personalization: Scalable Online Collaborative Filtering

Friday, June 29th, 2007

Interesting conference paper on the algorithms behind Google News:

Google News Personalization: Scalable Online Collaborative Filtering: Scalable Online Collaborative Filtering Industrial track, at the 16th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2007), May 8-12, Banff, Alberta, Canada

  • Authors:
  • Abhinandan Das (Google)
  • Mayur Datar (Google)
  • Ashutosh Garg (Google)
  • Shyam Rajaram (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign)

Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?

Friday, June 29th, 2007

a nice article from Duncan Watts on predictions and why predictions of success are difficult to make:

Duncan Watts, Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage? in the NYT article

Creating next generation applications and services for mobile devices: challenges and opportunities

Thursday, June 14th, 2007

This is an invited paper I have written with 3 other colleagues of mine to appear in the proceedings of PIMRC 2007, the 18th Annual IEEE Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications. The abstract is below:

Next generation applications and services have to be user-centric, and therefore must satisfy users’ needs and improve users’
lives. These systems also have to be able to adapt to different contexts, foresee users’ intentions, provide recommendations
accordingly and protect users’ privacy at the same time. In this paper we present our research on context-awareness applications,
context-recognition techniques and privacy and trust. To demonstrate the feasibility and the progress in this area, we have
developed a set of representative applications, two of which are presented in this paper. This perspective is the first glimpse
of the forthcoming applications and services in the mobile domain. In the discussion, we summarize the many possibilities and
describe the challenges for the research brought in by these new topics.

you can download the pdf file here: Creating next generation applications and services for mobile devices: challenges and opportunities

The facebook platform

Wednesday, June 13th, 2007

A very interesting post by Marc Andreessen (Netscape cofounder) about the Facebook platform.

Facebook is a quite popular social networking site. Take a look at this interesting video which highlights how social networking + personalization really payoff!