Personalized Social Systems for Local Communities

About the project

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

Systems

• Eventur (formerly PittCult) more
• CoMeT
• CourseAgent

Team

• PI: Peter Brusilovsky

• Chirayu Wongchokprasitti: Research on recommendations, main developer of the CoMeT system

• Danielle Lee: Research on recommender approached based on social links, main developer of Eventur system

• Claudia Lopez: Researcher on incentive-based design and user enagement

• Rosta Farzan: Research on user engagement, main developer of CourseAgent 2 system

Publications

• Brusilovsky, P., Parra, D., Sahebi, S., and Wongchokprasitti, C. (2010) Collaborative Information Finding in Smaller Communities: The Case of Research Talks. In: Proceedings of 6th International ICST Conference on Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing, Chicago, Illinois, USA October 9-12, 2010.
• Sahebi, S., Wongchokprasitti, C., and Brusilovsky, P. (2010) Recommending research colloquia: a study of several sources for user profiling. In: Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Information Heterogeneity and Fusion in Recommender Systems (HetRec 2010) at the 2010 ACM conference on Recommender systems, RecSys '10, Barcelona, Spain, September 26–30, 2010, ACM, pp. 32-38
• López, C. and Brusilovsky, P. (2011) Adapting Engagement e-mails to Users' Characteristics. In: Proceedings of Workshop on User Models for Motivational Systems: The affective and the rational routes to persuasion (UMMS 2011) at UMAP 2011, Girona, Spain, 11 July 2011, pp. 71-83.
• López, C. and Brusilovsky, P. (2012) Towards Adaptive Recruitment and Engagement Mechanisms in Social Systems. In: L. Ardissono and T. Kuflik (eds.): Advances in User Modeling. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 7138, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, pp. 382-396.
• López, C. and Brusilovsky, P. (2012) Designing Adaptive Engagement Approaches for Audience-bounded Online Communities. In: Proceedings of Workshop on Design, Influence and Social Technologies (DIST) at CSCW 2012, Seattle, USA, February 11-12, 2012.
• López, C., Farzan, R., and Brusilovsky, P. (2012) Personalized incremental users' engagement: driving contributions one step forward. In: Proceedings of the 17th ACM international conference on Supporting group work, Group’12, ACM, pp. 189–198.
• López, C., Farzan, R., and Brusilovsky, P. (2013) What Influences the Decision to Participate in Audience-bounded Online Communities. In: Proceedings of iConference’13, Fort Worth, USA.
• Nov, O., Arazy, O., López, C., and Brusilovsky, P. (2013) Exploring Personality-Targeted UI Design in Online Social Participation Systems. In: Proceedings of the 2013 Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI'2013, Paris, France, April 27-May 2, 2013, ACM, pp. 361-370.
• López, C., Butler, B., and Brusilovsky, P. (2014) Does Anything Ever Happen Around Here? Assessing the Online Information Landscape for Local Events. Journal of Urban Technology 21 (4), 95-123.
• Wongchokprasitti, C., Peltonen, J., Ruotsalo, T., Bandyopadhyay, P., Jacucci, G., and Brusilovsky, P. (2015) User Model in a Box: Cross-System User Model Transfer for Resolving Cold Start Problems. In: F. Ricci, K. Bontcheva, O. Conlan and S. Lawless (eds.) Proceedings of 23nd Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP 2015), Dublin, Ireland, , June 29 - July 3, 2015, Springer Verlag, pp. 289-301.