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.

The project was originally funded by the University of Pittsburgh through the Personalized Education program (2018-2020), however, it is still going on, several years after the end of the two original rounds of funding. In the course of the project, we developed and evaluated several versions of the interactive recommender system Grapevine.

Systems

• Grapevine - an interactive recommender system to help students in finding research advisors

Team

• PIs: Peter Brusilovsky, Eliza Beth Littleton, Dmitriy Babichenko

• Behnam Rahdari: The main developer of Grapevine system

Publications

• Rahdari, B., Brusilovsky, P., and Babichenko, D. (2020) Personalizing Information Exploration with an Open User Model. In: Proceedings of 31st ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, July 13-15, 2020, ACM, pp. 167-176 (paper)
• Rahdari, B., Brusilovsky, P., Babichenko, D., Littleton, E. B., Patel, R., Fawsett, J., and Blum, Z. (2020) Grapevine: A profile‐based exploratory search and recommendation system for finding research advisors. In: Proceedings of 83rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science & Technology, October 25-29, 2020 (paper)
• Rahdari, B., Brusilovsky, P., and Sabet, A. J. (2021) Controlling Personalized Recommendations in Two Dimensions with a Carousel-Based Interface. In: Proceedings of Joint Workshop on Interfaces and Human Decision Making for Recommender Systems (IntRS’21) at 2021 ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys’21), September 25, 2021, CEUR, pp. 112-122. (paper)
• Rahdari, B., Brusilovsky, P., and Sabet, A. J. (2021) Connecting Students with Research Advisors Through User-Controlled Recommendation. In: Proceedings of Fifteenth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 27 September 2021 - 1 October 2021, ACM, pp. 745-748. (paper)