Huddled Masses

After some extensive research, I decided to go the project route instead of the thesis route at RIT, primarily because I’m not immediately going to be working toward a doctorate. But also because I’m still a bit more interested in the code part of the research, and the project defense is rumored to be easier than the thesis, without the requirement to prove that my idea is original. At the end of the day, I’m still working full time, and have a family, so my primary concern right now is to get my degree completed as soon as I can.

My project proposal was accepted, and I’ve started working on code and databases. I’ll be posting regular updates here, along with a link to my subversion server, but I wanted to start by posting a short summary of my project.

The project comprises designing and implementing a hybrid recommender system for web–pages which uses data from a social tagging system to recommend interesting items to users. For the initial implementation, the tagging data will come from del.icio.us, one of the oldest and largest public social bookmarking systems. The system will cluster items using a self–organizing map (SOM) network and will include a new SOM visualizer that allows users to see and modify the system’s evaluation of their regions of interest.

The focus of the programming project will be a scraper for gathering tagged URLs from del.icio.us, a visualizer, and the recommender. The SOM network code will be based on existing implementations, and two recommenders will be built, to compare the relative quality of the recommendations: with one using a single map for URLs and users and the other using separate maps.

For those who are interested, the full project proposal is here with a short specification and design document, as well as my proposed schedule — that I’m not too far off of, so far .

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