My research interests include recommender system, human-computer interaction and social computing. Beyond research, I like doing some web development. Now I am leading a team redesigning MovieLens. In my free time, I like jogging, tweaking electronic devices and watching soccer games.
My current research focuses on recommender systems. MovieLens, a personalized movie recommendation system, is the yard where I work and play everyday. Data mining and machine learning methods are my shovels and human-computer interaction theory is my lawnmower. Now I am working on building innovative tagging applications to assist movie recommendation.
People from different cultures vary in cognition, emotion, and behavior. I worked with GroupLens members to explore cultural differences in a tagging system. We developed a model of cultural differences and performed a controlled empirical study with American and Chinese subjects to investigate questions that arise from the model. We found American and Chinese subjects differed in many ways. American and Chinese subjects differed in many ways: the number and types of tags they applied; the extent to which they applied suggested tags or entered new tags of their own; how often they applied tags that originated from a different culture; and how invested they became in their personal tagging habits. Our results are consistent with theories of cultural differences between Asian and Western cultures.
This project is already done but you can still play with our online surveys: English version, Chinese version. The picture on the right is a screenshot of the survey.
- War versus LiZhi in Forrest Gump: Cultural Effects in Tagging Communities, ICWSM 2012.
This page will contain some projects beyond research. Developing apps is great fun! I like trying all different kinds of languages and tools. Getting my hands dirty brings me tons of pleasure.
Hangout Organizer is an Android app using APIs of Google Maps, Google Voice, Yelp and Facebook.
Main idea: there are times people have a temporary hangout plan(such as having lunch with friends). They often
hope they can ask many friends and get replies in a short time. Telephone call is inefficent and slow;
Facebook/Twitter is slow in receiving replies. Hangout Organizer is designed to solve these problems. I use
Google Maps to simplify the process of business searching, Yelp API to fetch business information such as rating
and Google Voice + Facebook API to send messages or update FB status.
- To know more about this application, you can see this short slides.
- Because of the limitation of Yelp daily API requests and existing bugs I am aware of but have no time to fix, the apk file is not for download. :p
This page contains some facts about my home page and my preferrence towards web development tools.
This site was born on April 7th, 2011 and was last updated on February 2012. It was built using HTML+CSS+jQuery. This is the library I use to implement the tag cloud under 'home'.
I love web developing and I am looking forward to the day HTML5 becomes mature. I use some HTML5 tags in this site, for example, 'canvas' for the tag ball and 'ruby' for my Chinese name. But this is not a full HTML5 site because I want to avoid compatiability problems.
I am also a JavaScript fanboy. I know jQuery and YUI3, but jQuery is my favorite toy.
I know a little about GWT and Silverlight and have wrote small demos with them, but I believe they will die soon.(Writing js in Java/C#, eww...) HTML5 and JavaScript will rule the world. Flash? I don't know. I don't hate the company behind it. Let's will wait and see.
Thanks for visiting my home page.