The Pitt Grapevine

About the project

The goal of the project is to connect students with research advisors at the University of Pittsburgh through an interactive recommender system.

Supported by the University of Pittsburgh through the Personalized Education program (2018-2020)

The project explored the use of personalization and mobile computing to increase user engagement in location-bound social systems. The project was originally funded by a Research Award from Google to Peter Brusilovsky, however it continued for many years following the original round of funding. In the course of the project we developed, extended, and explored several location-bounded systems such as Comet, Eventur, and CourseAgent. These systems were actively used for many years in local Pittsburgh community. We developed a range of new recommendation technologies for these systems and explored new approaches to increase user engagement, which is the source of knowledge in local communities

Motivation

Social computing systems can serve as a tool for revitalizing and strengthening local communities - in particular by supporting online community information commons for enriching and actively disseminating information about local events, activities, and organizations. While existing social linking systems can allow people to follow or meet each other, they tend to do so in decontextualized virtual spaces and as a result are seen by many as a threat to local communities. In contrast, a social information system that provides a community information commons for collecting, organizing and exploring information about local events and organizations, has the potential to increase individuals’ awareness and connection with their community. However, creating an effective community information commons is challenging.

First, information about local events, activities and organizations is often fragmented, incomplete, and difficult to find. While existing channels work well for organizations able to devote resources to formal marketing and advertising, a sustainable community information commons must allow a more diverse set of community members to participate in collection and organization information in a decentralized fashion. Social computing technologies and techniques have the potential to provide a platform through which the small efforts of individuals, both within a community and beyond, can be mobilized to increase the quality of information available about local events, activities, and organizations. However, in spite of their potential, engaging users in social computing systems can be challenging. Users are eager to contribute for their own good (i.e., list an item to sell on Craigslist), but very hesitant to do it for a community good. Local community information systems must pursue different engagement strategies if they are to provide a useful, organized source of information about local events and activities.

At the same time, any system that is even moderately successful at aggregating information about community events has to be personalized. No one is interested all events and organizations. Even in a small community, the ability to focus in items of interest within a larger information stream is necessary. A viable community information commons must support personalized information access, enabling individuals to increase the likelihood of seeing personally interesting materials and decrease the distraction of irrelevant events.

The goal of this project is to investigate the nature of community information commons and develop social computing technologies and techniques to increase the impact and viability of these critical socio-technical systems.

Systems

• Grapevine more

Team

• PIs: Peter Brusilovsky:

• Behnam Rahdari: The main developer of Grapevine system