I was a research fellow with the GroupLens research group from May
2003 to December 2006. Then I accepted a job with Google. However,
WikiLens is still running.
My greatest research interest was (and is) Recommenders
Everywhere. People love to get recommendations. The world is too
big not to use a little guidance, especially from those you trust.
Collaborative recommender systems like MovieLens allow people to express
their opinions about things, such as movies, as ratings (say from 1 to
5), and then use those opinions to get things recommended that they
don't know about yet.
Currently, collaborative recommender systems are uncommon, because few
have the expertise to create or maintain one. Recommenders should be
everywhere, as common as web servers. Our project aims to create a
system where people can come together, contribute content, and receive
recommendations.
We are working on the WikiLens
system, based on an open source Wiki (PhpWiki). We have added the
ability to rate pages and receive recommendations, as well as features
that allow people to add content easily. The goal of our project is
to implement our system in a few small groups and allow people to
easily take our system to implement for themselves. We hope that the
system we are building will effectively empower users to create data,
express their opinions and get quality recommendations.
