WebIC: An Effective "Complete-Web" Recommender System

Many web recommendation systems direct users to webpages, from a single website, that other similar users have visited. By contrast, our WebIC web recommendation system is designed to locate "information content (IC) pages" --- pages the current user needs to see to complete her task --- from essentially anywhere on the web. WebIC first extracts the "browsing properties" of each word encountered in the user's current click-stream --- eg, how often each word appears in the title of a page in this sequence, or in the "anchor" of a link that was followed, etc. It then uses a user- and site-independent model, learned from a set of annotated web logs acquired in a user study, to determine which of these words is likely to appear in an IC page. We discuss how to use these IC-words to find IC-pages, and demonstrate empirically that this browsing-based approach works effectively.

Bio:
After earning a PhD from Stanford, Russ Greiner worked in both academic and industrial research before settling at the University of Alberta, where he is now a Professor in Computing Science and the founding Scientific Director of the Alberta Ingenuity Centre for Machine Learning, which won the ASTech Award for "Outstanding Leadership in Technology" in 2006. He has been Program Chair for the 2004 "Int'l Conf. on Machine Learning", Conference Chair for 2006 "Int'l Conf. on Machine Learning", Editor-in-Chief for "Computational Intelligence", and is serving on the editorial boards of a number of other journals. He was elected a Fellow of the AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) in 2007, and was awarded a McCalla Professorship in 2005-06 and a Killam Professorship in 2007.