Monthly Archives: April 2014

White House, Department of Education, and Chronicle of Higher Education highlight our college recommendation software

Two organizations have joined forces to answer important questions related to how search, discovery and recommendation online are affecting student college choices. PossibilityU, an innovative college guidance platform, and GroupLens, a research lab dedicated to recommender systems and online communities in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, announced a research partnership to explore how college recommendations online can effect a broad range of student outcomes.

For the past 3 years, PossibilityU’s unique college guidance program has been matching high school students across the country with colleges that match their talents, aspirations and family budgets. The program features guided inquiry, data visualizations and personalized, Netflix-like recommendations—all designed to give students confidence in their choices. PossibilityU also features a blended-learning video curriculum created to help students and parents become better consumers of higher education.

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This post describes work being presented at WWW 2014, by Tien Nguyen

Those of you following recommender systems have almost certainly heard the debate about filter bubbles.  This concept, perhaps best articulated by Eli Pariser, argues that recommenders have the potential to trap users into increasingly similar content, isolating them from the diversity of content that makes people rich learners.

We decided to test this concept empirically, using longitudinal data from MovieLens.  Specifically, we wanted to answer two questions:

• Do recommended movies get narrower as users continue to rate movies?

• Do users consume narrower movies — and if so, is this a consequence of taking recommendations?

What we found surprised us.

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