GroupLens Research explained

GroupLens Research is a human–computer interaction research lab in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities specializing in recommender systems and online communities. GroupLens also works with mobile and ubiquitous technologies, digital libraries, and local geographic information systems.

The GroupLens lab was one of the first to study automated recommender systems with the construction of the "GroupLens" recommender, a Usenet article recommendation engine, and MovieLens, a popular movie recommendation site used to study recommendation engines, tagging systems, and user interfaces. The lab has also gained notability for its members' work studying open content communities such as Cyclopath, a geo-wiki that was used in the Twin Cities to help plan the regional cycling system.^[1]

History

Formation

In 1992, John Riedl and Paul Resnick attended theCSCW conferencetogether. After they heard keynote speaker Shumpei Kumon talkabout his vision for an information economy,^[2] they began working on a collaborative filteringsystem for Usenet news. The system collected ratings from Usenet readers and used those ratings to predict how much other readers would like an article before they read it. This recommendation engine was one of the first automated collaborative filtering systems in which algorithms were used to automatically form predictions based on historical patterns of ratings.^[3] The overall system was called the "GroupLens" recommender, and the servers that collected the ratings and performed the computation were called the "Better Bit Bureau". This name was later dropped after a request from the Better Business Bureau. "GroupLens" is now used as a name both for this recommender system, and for the research lab at the University of Minnesota.

A feasibility test was done between MIT andthe University of Minnesota and a research paper was published includingthe algorithm, the system design, and the results of the feasibilitystudy, in the CSCW conference of 1994.^[4]

In 1993, Riedl and Resnick invited Joseph Konstan to join theteam. Together, they decided to create a higher-performanceimplementation of the algorithms to support larger-scale deployments.In summer 1995 the team gatheredBradley Miller, David Maltz,Jon Herlocker, and Mark Claypool for "Hack Week" to createthe new implementation, and to plan the next round of experiments.^[5]

In the Spring of 1996, the first workshop oncollaborative filtering was put together by Resnick andHal Varian at the University of California, Berkeley.^[6] There, researchers from projects around the USthat were studying similar systems came together to share ideas andexperience.

Net Perceptions

In the summer of 1996, David Gardiner, a former Ph.D. student of Riedl's, introduced John Riedl to Steven Snyder. Snyder had been an early employee at Microsoft, but left Microsoft to come to Minnesota to do a Ph.D. in Psychology. He realized the commercial potential of collaborative filtering, and encouraged the team to found a company in April 1996. By June, Gardiner, Snyder, Miller, Riedl, and Konstan had incorporated their company, and by July they had their first round of funding, from Hummer Winblad Venture Partnersventure capital company.^[7] Net Perceptions went on to be one of the leading companies inpersonalization during the Internet boom of the late 1990s, and stayedin business until 2004.^[8] Based on their experience, Riedl and Konstan wrote a book about the lessons learned from deploying recommenders in practice.^[9] Recommender systems have since become ubiquitous in the online world, with leading vendors such as Amazon and Netflix deploying highly sophisticated recommender systems.^[10] Netflix even offered a $1 million prize for improvements in recommender technology.^[11]

Whenthe EachMovie^[12] site closed in 1997, the researchers behind it releasedthe anonymous rating data they had collected, for other researchersto use. The GroupLens Research team, led by Brent Dahlen and JonHerlocker, used this data set to jumpstart a new movie recommendationsite called MovieLens which has been a very visible research platform, including a detailed discussion in a New Yorker article byMalcolm Gladwell,^[13] and a report in a full episode of ABC Nightline.^[14]

Between 1997 and 2002 the group continued its research oncollaborative filtering, which became known in the community by themore general term of recommender systems. With Joe Konstan's expertise in user interfaces,^{[15] [16]} the team began exploring interface issues in recommenders, such as explanations,^[17] and meta-recommendation systems.^[18]

Studying online communities

In 2002, GroupLens expanded into social computing and online communities with the addition of Loren Terveen, who was known for his research of social recommender systems such as PHOAKS.^{[19] [20]}

In order to broaden the set of research ideas and tools they used,Riedl, Konstan, and Terveen invited colleagues in social psychology(Robert Kraut and Sara Kiesler, of theCarnegie Mellon Human Computer Interaction Institute), andeconomic and social analysis (Paul Resnick andYan Chen of theUniversity of Michigan School of Information) to collaborate. Thenew, larger team adopted the name CommunityLab, and lookedgenerally at the effects of technological interventions on theperformance of online communities. For instance, some of theirresearch explored technology for enriching conversation systems,^[21] while other research explored the personal, social, and economicmotivations for user ratings.^{[22] [23]}

In 2008 GroupLens launched Cyclopath,^[24] a computational geo-wiki for bicyclists within a city.^{[25] [26]}

In 2010, GroupLens won the annual ACM software system award.^[27] Riedl died in 2013.^[28]

Brent Hecht joined the GroupLens faculty in 2013, focusing on geographic human-computer interaction. Lana Yarosh joined the GroupLens faculty in 2014; she works with social computing and child-computer interaction. A third professor, Haiyi Zhu, joined in 2015. Haiyi has published research on Facebook and other social networks. Stevie Chancellor, a human-centered computing and social computing researcher, joined the GroupLens faculty in 2020.^[29]

Contributions

• The MovieLens recommender system: MovieLens is a non-commercial movie recommender system that has been running since 1997 with over 164,000 unique visitors as of 2009, who have provided over 15 million movie ratings.^[30]
• MovieLens ratings datasets: In the early days of recommender systems, research was slowed down by the lack of publicly available datasets. In response to requests from other researchers, GroupLens released three datasets:^[31] the MovieLens 100,000 rating dataset, the MovieLens 1 million rating dataset, and the MovieLens 10 million rating dataset. These datasets became the standard datasets for recommender research, and have been used in over 300 papers by researchers around the world. The dataset is also being used for teaching about recommender technology.^[32]
• MovieLens tagging dataset: GroupLens added tagging to MovieLens in 2006. Since then, users have provided over 85,000 applications of 14,000 unique tags to movies.^[33] The MovieLens 10 million ratings dataset also includes a 100,000 tag applications dataset for researchers to use.
• Information leakage from recommender datasets: a paper in the information retrieval conference analyzed the privacy risks to users of having large recommender datasets released. The basic risk discovered is that an anonymized dataset might be combined with public information to identify a user. For instance, a user who has written about his preference for movies on online forums could be associated with a specific row in the MovieLens datasets. In some cases, these associations might leak information the user would prefer to keep private.^{[34] [35]}
• Wikipedia research: The study of value and vandalism in Wikipedia published in 2007^[36] described the concentration of contribution across Wikipedia editors. This paper was one of the first to focus on the length of time that a contribution survives within Wikipedia as a measure of its value. The paper also investigated the effects of vandalism on Wikipedia readers, by measuring the probability that a view of a page would capture that page in a vandalized state. GroupLens has also explored ways to help editors find pages which they can effectively contribute to with the SuggestBot recommender.^[37] The group has also explored the evolution of the norms in Wikipedia that determine which articles are accepted or rejected, and the effect of changes in those norms on the Long Tail of Wikipedia articles.^[38] GroupLens has also explored the functioning of the informal peer review system within Wikipedia to discover ways the decisions being made appear to be influenced inappropriately by ownership, and that experience does not seem to change editor performance very much.^{[39] [40]} GroupLens researchers have also explored visualizations of the edit history of Wikipedia articles.^[41] In 2011, the GroupLens researchers completed a scientific exploration of gender imbalance in Wikipedia's popular editors, resulting in finding that there was a large gap between male and female editors.^[42]
• Shilling recommender systems: GroupLens has explored ways that users of recommender systems can attempt to inappropriately influence the recommendations given to other users.^[43] They call this behavior shilling, because of its relationship to the practice of hiring associates to pretend to be enthusiastic customers. They showed that some types of shilling are likely to be effective in practice. One concern about shilling is that the false predictions may change the reported opinions of later users, further corrupting the recommendations.^{[44] [45]}
• Cyclopath: Beginning in 2008, GroupLens launched Cyclopath, a computational geo-wiki for local bicyclists. Cyclopath has since been used by hundreds of cyclists within the Twin Cities.^[46] More recently, Cyclopath has been adopted by the Twin Cities Metropolitan Council to help plan the regional cycling system.^[1]

External links

• GroupLens Research Homepage

Notes and References

1. Web site: Cycloplan . 2010-01-04 . https://web.archive.org/web/20110703065648/http://www.bikewalktwincities.org/projects/ntp-program-area/cycloplan . 2011-07-03 . dead .
2. Kumon. Shumpei. 1992. From wealth to wisdom: a change in the social paradigm. Computer Supported Cooperative Work. ACM Press. 3. 10.1145/143457.371587. 0-89791-542-9. Proceedings of the 1992 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work.
3. Book: Goldman, Alvin I. Knowledge in a Social World. Oxford University Press. 1999. 978-0-19-823820-1. 10.1093/0198238207.001.0001. Another possibility is "social filtering" systems, such as GroupLens.. Alvin Goldman.
4. Resnick. Paul. Iacovou, Neophytos. Suchak, Mitesh. Bergstrom, Peter. Riedl, John. 1994. GroupLens: an open architecture for collaborative filtering of netnews. Computer Supported Cooperative Work. ACM Press. 175 - 186. 10.1145/192844.192905. 0-89791-689-1. Proceedings of the 1994 International ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. free.
5. Borchers. Al. Herlocker. Jon. Konstan. Joseph. Riedl. John. April 1998. Ganging up on Information Overload. Computer. 31. 4. 106 - 108. 10.1109/2.666847. 0018-9162.
6. Web site: Collaborative Filtering . March 16, 1996 . 2009-12-30 . 2013-08-17 . https://web.archive.org/web/20130817042907/http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/resources/collab/ . dead .
7. Web site: Minnesota in the .Com Age . Minnesota Public Radio . 1999 . 2009-12-30.
8. Web site: Firms honored at e-commerce awards . MIT . May 19, 1999.
9. Book: Word of Mouse: The Marketing Power of Collaborative Filtering . Riedl . John . Konstan . Joseph . Vrooman . Eric . August 2002 . Grand Central . 978-0-7595-2727-0.
10. News: Technology Gets Personal . Steven . Zeitchik . The Wall Street Journal . July 18, 2008 . W9 . 2009-12-23.
11. News: Netflix offers cash for good suggestions . Katie . Hafner . Katie Hafner . The New York Times . October 2, 2006 . 2009-12-23.
12. An Adaptive Recommendation System with a Coordinator Agent . Myungeun . Lim . Kim, Juntae . 2001 . Asia-Pacific Conference on Web Intelligence . Proceedings of the First Asia-Pacific Conference on Web Intelligence: Research and Development . Lecture Notes in Computer Science . 2198/2001 . Springer Berlin/Heidelberg . 438 - 442 . 978-3-540-42730-8 . 10.1007/3-540-45490-X_56 . 2009-12-30 .
13. Annals of Marketing: The Science of the Sleeper: How the Information Age Could Blow Away the Blockbuster . Malcolm . Gladwell . Malcolm Gladwell . New Yorker . 75 . 29 . October 4, 1999 . 48 - 55 . 2009-12-29 . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20091230235916/http://gladwell.com/1999/1999_10_04_a_sleeper.htm . December 30, 2009 .
14. Web site: Krulwich . Robert . Robert Krulwich . December 10, 1999 . ABC Nightline: Soulmate . ABC .
15. SIGCHI 2003 Election Results . . 35 . 3 . July–August 2003 . 2010-01-04.
16. President's Report: Advancing the Field . Joseph . Konstan . SIGCHI Bulletin . 36 . 2 . March–April 2004 . 2009-12-30.
17. Herlocker. Jon. Konstan, Joseph. Riedl, John. 2000. Explaining Collaborative Filtering Recommendations. Computer Supported Cooperative Work. ACM Press. 241 - 259. 10.1145/358916.358995. 1-58113-222-0. http://www.grouplens.org/node/220. Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work.
18. Meta-recommendation Systems: User-controlled Integration of Diverse Recommendations . J. Ben . Schafer . Konstan, Joseph . Riedl, John . 2002 . Conference on Information and Knowledge Management . http://www.csee.umbc.edu/cikm/2002/ . Proceedings of the eleventh international conference on Information and knowledge management . ACM Press . 43 - 51 . 1-58113-492-4 . 10.1145/584792.584803 . 2010-01-06.
19. Book: From Usenet to CoWebs: Interacting with Social Information Spaces . Lueg . Christopher . Fisher . Danyel . Springer . 2003 . 978-1-85233-532-8.
20. Loren . Terveen . Will . Hill . Brian . Amento . David . McDonald . Josh . Creter . PHOAKS: a system for sharing recommendations . Communications of the ACM . 40 . 3 . March 1997 . 59 - 62 . 0001-0782 . 10.1145/245108.245122. 10.1.1.103.8264 . 207201836 .
21. Talk amongst yourselves: inviting users to participate in online conversations . F. Maxwell . Harper . Dan . Frankowski . Sara . Drenner . Yuqing . Ren . Sara . Kiesler . Loren . Terveen . Robert . Kraut . John . Riedl . 2007 . International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces . http://iuiconf.org/ . Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces . ACM Press . 62 - 71 . 978-1-59593-481-9 . 10.1145/1216295.1216313 . 2009-12-29.
22. An Economic Model of User Rating in an Online Recommender System . F. Maxwell . Harper . Xin . Li . Yan . Chen . Joseph . Konstan . 2005 . 10th International Conference on User Modeling . http://gate.ac.uk/conferences/um2005/um05.html . User Modeling 2005 Proceedings . Lecture Notes in Computer Science . 3538 . Springer . 307 - 316 . 978-3-540-27885-6 . 10.1007/11527886_40 . 2009-12-29.
23. Motivating Participation by Displaying the Value of Contribution . Al Mamunur . Rashid . Ling, Kimberly . Tassone, Regina D. . Resnick, Paul . Kraut, Robert . Riedl, John . 2006 . ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems . http://www.chi2006.org/ . Proceedings of the 2006 CHI Conference . Lecture Notes in Computer Science . 3538 . Springer . 955 - 958 . 1-59593-372-7 . 10.1145/1124772.1124915 . 2009-12-30.
24. Web site: cyclopath.org . cyclopath.org . 2012-01-06.
25. News: Biking website pools cyclists' expertise . Tony . Gonzalez . Star Tribune . Minneapolis . July 18, 2008 . 2010-01-04.
26. News: Mapquest for the cycling set . Richard . Chin . . A1 . July 19, 2008 . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20150218165434/http://www.twincities.com/ci_9928054 . February 18, 2015 . .
27. Web site: Software System Award - Award Winners: List By Year. acm.org. 2013-08-24. 2016-05-05. https://web.archive.org/web/20160505152017/http://awards.acm.org/software_system/year.cfm. dead.
28. Web site: Obituary: U's John Riedl was pioneer of recommender systems. 2021-03-14. Star Tribune.
29. Web site: New professor brings focus on human-centered machine learning . June 5, 2020 .
30. Tagsplanations: Explaining Recommendations using Tags . Jesse . Vig . Shilad . Sen . John . Riedl . 2009 . International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces . http://iuiconf.org/ . Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces . ACM Press . 47 - 56 . 978-1-60558-168-2 . 10.1145/1502650.1502661 . 2009-12-30.
31. Web site: MovieLens. 6 September 2013.
32. Book: Segaran , Toby . Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications . O'Reilly Media . August 2007 . 978-0-596-52932-1 .
33. Tagommenders: Connecting Users to Items through Tags . Shilad . Sen . Jesse . Vig . John . Riedl . 2009 . International World Wide Web Conference . http://www2009.org/ . Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World wide web . ACM Press . 671 - 680 . 978-1-60558-487-4 . 10.1145/1526709.1526800 . 2009-12-29.
34. You are what you say: privacy risks of public mentions . Dan . Frankowski . Dan . Cosley . Shilad . Sen . Loren . Terveen . John . Riedl . 2006 . Annual ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval . http://www.sigir.org/ . Proceedings of the 29th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval . ACM Press . 565 - 572 . 1-59593-369-7 . 10.1145/1148170.1148267 . 2009-12-29 .
35. Web site: Schneier on Security: A blog covering security and security technology . Schneier . Bruce . Bruce Schneier . August 2006 . 2009-12-29.
36. Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Wikipedia . Reid . Priedhorsky . Jilin . Chen . Shyong (Tony) . Lam . Katherine . Panciera . Loren . Terveen . John . Riedl . 2007 . Conference on Supporting Group Work . http://www.acm.org/conferences/group/conferences/group07/ . Proceedings of the 2007 international ACM conference on Supporting group work . ACM Press . 259 - 268 . 978-1-59593-845-9 . 10.1145/1316624.1316663 . 2009-12-29 . https://web.archive.org/web/20101215143322/http://grouplens.org/node/113 . 2010-12-15 . dead .
37. SuggestBot: Using Intelligent Task Routing to Help People Find Work in Wikipedia . Dan . Cosley . Dan . Frankowski . Loren . Terveen . John . Riedl . 2008 . Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces . Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces . ACM Press . 32 - 41 . 978-1-59593-481-9 . 10.1145/1216295.1216309 . 2010-01-04.
38. Is Wikipedia Growing a Longer Tail? . Shyong (Tony) K. . Lam . John . Riedl . 2009 . International Conference on Supporting Group Work . http://www.acm.org/conferences/group/conferences/group09/ . Proceedings of the 2009 international ACM conference on Supporting Group Work . ACM Press . 105–114 . 978-1-60558-500-0 . 10.1145/1531674.1531690 . 2010-01-04.
39. A Jury of Your Peers: Quality, Experience and Ownership in Wikipedia . Aaron . Halfaker . Aaron Halfaker . Aniket . Kittur . Robert . Kraut . John . Riedl . 2009 . International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration . http://www.wikisym.org/ws2009/ . Proceedings of the 2009 International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration . ACM Press . 978-1-60558-730-1 . 10.1145/1641309.1641332 . 2010-01-04.
40. Wikipedians are born, not made: a study of power editors on Wikipedia . Katherine . Panciera . Aaron . Halfaker . Loren . Terveen . 2009 . International Conference on Supporting Group Work . http://www.acm.org/conferences/group/conferences/group09/ . Proceedings of the 2009 international ACM conference on Supporting Group Work . ACM Press . 978-1-60558-500-0 . 10.1145/1531674.1531682 . 2010-01-04.
41. rv you're dumb: Identifying Discarded Work in Wiki Article History . Michael . Ekstrand . John . Riedl . 2009 . International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration . http://www.wikisym.org/ws2009/ . Proceedings of the 2009 International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration . ACM Press . 978-1-60558-730-1 . 10.1145/1641309.1641317 . 2010-01-04.
42. WP: Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia's Gender Imbalance . Shyong K. . Lam . Uduwage . Anuradha . Dong . Zhenhua . Shilad . Sen . John . Riedl . 2011 . The International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration . http://www.wikisym.org/ws2011/start . Proceedings of the 7th international symposium on wikis and open collaboration . ACM Press . 1 - 10 . 10.1145/2038558.2038560 . 2011-10-25 . 2011-09-20 . https://web.archive.org/web/20110920031047/http://www.grouplens.org/node/466 . dead .
43. Shilling recommender systems for fun and profit . Shyong K. . Lam . John . Riedl . 2004 . International World Wide Web Conference . http://www.iw3c2.org/WWW2004/ . Proceedings of the 13th international conference on World Wide Web . ACM Press . 393 - 402 . 1-58113-844-X . 10.1145/988672.988726 . 2010-01-04.
44. News: False Web Ratings Swing Opinion, Study Says . Julie . Charles . May 22, 2003 . The New York Times . G4 . 2009-12-23.
45. Is Seeing Believing? How Recommender Systems Influence Users' Opinions . Dan . Cosley . Shyong K. . Lam . Istvan . Albert . Joseph A. . Konstan . John . Riedl . 2003 . Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems . http://www.chi2003.org/ . ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems . ACM Press . 1-58113-630-7 . 10.1145/642611.642713 . 2010-01-04.
46. Eliciting and Focusing Geographic Volunteer Work . Reid . Priedhorsky . Mikhil . Masli . Loren . Terveen . 2010 . Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work . http://www.cscw2010.org/ . Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work . ACM Press . 978-1-60558-795-0 . 10.1145/1718918.1718931 . 2010-03-02 . https://web.archive.org/web/20100612222015/http://grouplens.org/node/434 . 2010-06-12 . dead .