Social Personalization and Recommender Systems

The quantity of accessible information has been growing rapidly and far exceeded human processing capabilities. The sheer abundance of information often prevents users from discovering the desired information or aggravates making informed choices. This highlights the pressing need for intelligent personalized applications that simplify information access and discovery and provide adaptive services, which take into account the preferences and needs of their users. One type of personalized application that has recently become tremendously popular in research and industry is recommender systems. These provide to users personalized recommendations about information and products they may be interested to examine or purchase. This is often achieved by exploiting social methods, which amalgamate past experiences of other users in order to identify most valuable information and products. Extensive research into recommender systems over the last decade has yielded a wide variety of techniques, which have been published at a range of reputable venues and subsequently adopted by numerous Web-sites and services. This course will provide the participants with broad overview and thorough understanding of algorithms and practically deployed Web and mobile applications of personalized technologies.