User Experience and Technology Acceptance Issues in Recommender Systems

Speaker:	Dr. Pearl PU
		Human Computer Interaction Group
		Faculty of Information and Communication Sciences
		Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne
		Switzerland

Title:		"User Experience and Technology Acceptance Issues in
		 Recommender Systems"

Date:		Monday, 10 May 2010

Time:		4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:		Lecture Theater F (near lifts 25/26), HKUST


Abstract:

As online stores offer practically an infinite shelf space, recommender
systems are playing an increasingly important role in helping users
*search*and *discover* items that they may want to buy. In this talk, I
first start with a brief survey of the rating based social recommender
systems and their applications in online industry. I will then spend some
time discussing some of the unsolved issues, especially concerning user
adoption problems such as the cold start phenomena, users? acceptance of
recommendations, and personalization. The main part of the talk focuses on
the technology behind critiquing based recommender (CBR) systems. Even
though they may not address all of the user issues, CBR systems offer some
effective solutions. They do not require users to leave traces of their
interests via behavioral patterns. Instead, they encourage users to
express them via the interface. Moreover, since users are completely
involved in the preference elicitation process in such systems, users feel
more in control of the recommendation process, and as a consequence they
are more convinced of the products recommended to them. I will finish the
talk by explaining the baggage carousel phenomenon and show you how
critiquing based recommender systems enable users find personalized items
without expending extra interaction effort. Through the analysis of some
of our empirical studies, I hope to reveal to you some insights on the
effective design of recommender systems for scalable user adoption.


*******************
Biography:

Dr. Pearl Pu is the director of the Human Computer Interaction Group in
the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). Her research interests include
decision support, electronic commerce, online consumer decision behavior,
product recommender systems, travel planning tools, trust-inspiring
interfaces for recommender agent, music recommenders, scalable user
experience, and social navigation. She has been recently elected as the
general chair for the ACM international conference on Recommender Systems
(Recsys 2008) and ACM international conference on Intelligent User
Interfaces (IUI 2011), and program co-chair of the ACM international
conference in Electronic Commerce (EC 2009) and Adaptive Hypermedia and
Adaptive Web-Based Systems (AH 2008).

Her recent publications included papers from Electronic Commerce Research
Journal, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Knowledge based
Systems, AAAI, ACM ECommerce, AI Communications, International Conferences
on Intelligent User Interfaces, ACM CHI, ACM EC, AH, IEEE InfoVis, AVI and
the Constraints journal's special issue on Constraint Agents.

A native from Shanghai, China, she moved to the United States shortly
after passing the entrance examination to the ZheJiang University. She
obtained her Master and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania
in artificial intelligence and computer graphics. She was a visiting
scholar at Stanford University in 2001, both in the database and HCI
groups.