Dan Frankowski
EX-Research Fellow
University of Minnesota
Department of Computer Science

Email: dfrankow@cs.umn.edu


Introduction

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.