Keynotes

From Understanding to Enabling Networks: Using Web Science to Enhance Recommender Systems

by Noshir Contractor (Northwestern University)

Recent advances in Web Science provide comprehensive digital traces of social actions, interactions, and transactions. These data provide an unprecedented exploratorium to model the socio-technical motivations for creating, maintaining, dissolving, and reconstituting multidimensional social networks. Multidimensional networks include multiple types of nodes (people, documents, datasets, tags, etc.) and multiple types of relationships (co-authorship, citation, web links, etc). Using examples from research in team science and massively multiplayer online games, Contractor will argue that Web Science serves as the foundation for the development of social network theories and methods to help advance our ability to understand the emergence of effective multidimensional networks. More importantly, he will argue that these insights will also enable multidimensional networks by building a new generation of recommender systems that leverage our research insights on the socio-technical motivations for creating ties.

About The Speaker

Noshir Contractor is the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the McCormick School of Engineering & Applied Science, the School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, USA. He is the Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group at Northwestern University.

He is investigating factors that lead to the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of dynamically linked social and knowledge networks in a wide variety of contexts including communities of practice in business, translational science and engineering communities, public health networks and virtual worlds. His research program has been funded continuously for over a decade by major grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation with additional current funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), Air Force Office of Research Support, Army Research Institute, Army Research Laboratory and the MacArthur Foundation.

Professor Contractor has published or presented over 250 research papers dealing with communicating and organizing. His book titled Theories of Communication Networks (co-authored with Professor Peter Monge and published by Oxford University Press) received the 2003 Book of the Year award from the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association. He is the lead developer of C-IKNOW (Cyberinfrastructure for Inquiring Knowledge Networks On the Web), a socio-technical environment to understand and enable networks among communities, as well as Blanche, a software environment to simulate the dynamics of social networks.

Recommender Systems at the Long Tail

by Neel Sundaresan (Head of eBay Labs)

Recommender systems form an essential part of e-commerce systems. In this talk we take a top-down view of recommender systems and identify challenges, opportunities, and approaches in building recommender systems for a marketplace platform. We use eBay as an example where the elaborate interaction offers opportunities for different types of recommendations. The platform also poses complexities resulting from high sparsity and transient nature of the item space, diversity in buyer and seller space, complexities of formats, shipping, etc. We also propose and discuss the six key dimensions of recommender systems – the Who, What, When, Why, Where and the How. Our discussion can be generalized beyond eBay to other marketplaces or online systems nuances of user level of engagement offers opportunities for differential recommendations.

About the Speaker

Neel Sundaresan is a Senior Director at eBay Research Labs where he has been a head for the past 5 years. He leads research in areas that include large scale platforms for eCommerce systems including search, classification, recommender systems, text mining, vision, trust, and social networks and economics of eCommerce. Prior to joining eBay, he was a founder and CTO of a startup focused on multi-attribute fuzzy search and network CRM. Prior to this, he was the head of the eMerging Internet Technologies group at the IBM Almaden Research Center. There he built the first XML-based Search Engine. He was one of the early leaders in building XML technologies including schema-aware compression algorithms, application component generators, and pattern-match systems and compilers. He built the first RDF reference implementation as a W3C standard recommendation. He led research work in other areas like domain specific search engines, multi-modal interfaces and assistive technologies, semantic transcoding, and web mining. Prior to this he worked on C++ compiler and runtime systems for massively parallel machines and for shared memory systems and also on retargetable compilers, program translators and generators. He has over 50 research publications and several patents to his credit. He has been a frequent speaker at several national and international technology conferences. He has advised several PhD and several masters dissertations. He has a degree in mathematics and a masters in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, India and a PhD in computer science from Indiana University, Bloomington.