We’d like to congratulate two GroupLens Ph.D. students – Hannah Miller (@hannahjean515, website) and Taavi Taijala – on being awarded National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships!
Hannah’s proposal focused on strengthening a social network user’s experience by bootstrapping from previously established social network presence.
Taavi proposed work on better explaining recommender systems output, focusing on the use of analogies to describe recommendations.
There were more than 16,000 applications for the Graduate Research Fellowship nationwide from all areas of science and engineering. The National Science Foundation (NSF) only awarded them to 2,000 students (of which GroupLens members were 0.1%!). The awards financially support 36 months of research and include opportunities for international research experiences.
Congratulations again, Taavi and Hannah!
