[4eyes] Visual Computing Cafe Seminar Friday Dec. 6, 2013

[Pradeep Sen]

UCSB Visual Computing Café Seminar Friday December 6, 2013
12:30pm - 1:30pm, Harold Frank Hall 1132 Auditorium


TITLE:
Trust, Recommendation, and the User Interface
by John O'Donovan, UC Santa Barbara


ABSTRACT:

This talk focuses on communicating trust and credibility
information on the web, with a particular emphasis on
recommender systems.  To really understand this topic, we
must examine the broad picture of mining, tailoring,
representing and communicating information on the web that
can impact on a trust-decision.  This includes design and
evaluation of interactive web-based interface mechanisms for
controlling complex algorithms such as recommender systems (RS).

I will discuss ways that our research integrates methods,
ideas and practices from diverse research areas such as UI
and Interaction design, HCI and the behavioral/cognitive sciences,
for the purpose of understanding trust in complex information
spaces.   I will talk about the roles that factual information,
in tandem with user-specific subjective metrics such as trust
and competence can play in the process of recommendation,
particularly in emerging “social” recommender systems – those
where predictions are made from groups with pre-existing social
connections.   Visualization and the user interface also plays an
important role in these systems, since background information on
a recommendation can reveal potentially large and impactful
amounts of pre-existing knowledge from the a-priori social
relationship.


BIO:

John is a research scientist in the Department of Computer
Science, UCSB.  He received his PhD from University College
Dublin in 2008.   John has published more than 40 technical
papers and has successfully secured external research funding
from sources such as ARL, KDD and NSF over the past several years.
He currently leads a team of computer scientists and cognitive
science researchers from CMU, UIUC, and ARL as part of a 5-year
network science project. His well cited thesis work on “Trust in
recommender systems” was nominated for a national doctoral
dissertation award in Science and Engineering, and his most recent
work on information credibility won a best paper award at IEEE
SocialCom 2013. John is an active Editor, PC member and reviewer
for more than 10 conferences, workshops, and journals.  He is a
member of ACM and IEEE.



-- 
Pradeep Sen
Associate Professor
UCSB MIRAGE Lab
Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9560