By Max Harper on
Guest written by Maryam Hedayati, Steph Herbers, Sophia Maymudes, and Anna Meyer.
Christmas is almost here. Do you know what most people won’t be doing on December 25th? Writing online restaurant reviews. Let’s dive deeper into the world of online restaurant reviews to learn more about this and other interesting trends. (more…)
By Max Harper on
While your TV’s remote might already have a microphone in it for voice commands, it is no replacement for a video store clerk. The current generation of devices respond to a limited set of commands, offer mostly shallow integration with deeper personalization, and may not understand complicated recommendation-seeking questions. Our research aims to develop techniques that can bring together voice recognition technologies, personalization, and advanced search features to provide more natural ways for people to discover new digital content. (more…)
By Max Harper on
The MovieLens datasets are full of data describing how people rate movies. As it turns out, these datasets have been useful to lots of folks, from recommender systems researchers to the readers of popular-press programming books. Though it is difficult to measure the full extent of the datasets’ impact, we see that they were downloaded more than 140,000 times in 2014, and that the keyword “movielens” currently results in over 8,900 results in Google Scholar.
It is tempting to view these collections of ratings as a cohesive whole. However, the truth of the matter is that the datasets are the product of 17 years of member activity in a web site that has seen its fair share of changes and experimental features. Given the extent of attention — research and otherwise — given to these datasets, it seems worth exploring the relationship between the system and the resulting data.
By Max Harper on
The music services that I subscribe to don’t understand me very well. Pandora, which puts together personalized radio stations, seems to think that I only like the very most popular music, which I don’t. Spotify, which offers a new personalized playlist for me each week, seems to think that I only like quite obscure music. But neither of them get it right, and I wish that I could tell them to change.
By Max Harper on
It has been about six years since we released our previous major ratings dataset, MovieLens 10M. Today, we have released its successor, MovieLens 20M, alongside two new non-archival datasets for education and development. These datasets are available for download at http://grouplens.org/datasets/movielens/. (more…)