• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.119-140
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• 2007

Recommender systems enable a user to decide which information is interesting and valuable in our world of information overload. As the recent studies of distributed computing environment have been progressing actively, recommender systems, most of which were centralized, have changed toward a peer-to-peer approach. Collaborative Filtering (CF), one of the most successful technologies in recommender systems, presents several limitations, namely sparsity, scalability, cold start, and the shilling problem, in spite of its popularity. The move from centralized systems to distributed approaches can partially improve the issues; distrust of recommendation and abuses of personal information. However, distributed systems can be vulnerable to attackers, who may inject biased profiles to force systems to adapt their objectives. In this paper, we consider both effective CF in P2P environment in order to improve overall performance of system and efficient solution of the problems related to abuses of personal data and attacks of malicious users. To deal with these issues, we propose a multi-agent framework for a distributed CF focusing on the trust relationships between individuals, i.e. web of trust. We employ an agent-based approach to improve the efficiency of distributed computing and propagate trust information among users with effect. The experimental evaluation shows that the proposed method brings significant improvement in terms of the distributed computing of similarity model building and the robustness of system against malicious attacks. Finally, we are planning to study trust propagation mechanisms by taking trust decay problem into consideration.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.75-87
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• 2016

With the exploration of digital academic information, it is certainly required to develop more effective academic contents recommender system in order to accommodate increasing needs for accessing more personalized academic contents. Considering historical usage data, the academic content recommender system recommends personalized academic contents which corresponds with each user's preference. So, the academic content recommender system effectively increases not only the accessibility but also usability of digital academic contents. In this paper, we propose the new journal recommendation technique based on information of journal subscription and web usage logs in order to properly recommend more personalized academic contents. Our proposed recommendation method predicts user's preference with the institution similarity, the journal similarity and journal importance based on citation relationship data of references and finally compose institute-oriented recommendations. Also, we develop a recommender system prototype. Our developed recommender system efficiently collects usage logs from distributed web sites and processes collected data which are proper to be used in proposed recommender technique. We conduct compare performance analysis between existing recommender techniques. Through the performance analysis, we know that our proposed technique is superior to existing recommender methods.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartD
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• v.9D no.2
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• pp.329-336
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• 2002

With the fast development of Internet environment, e-Commerce is rapidly increasing. n the expanding e-Commerce environment, the need for a new e-Commerce systems what will deliver products to the customer rapidly and increase sales is growing bigger. Recently, these requirements brought many researches on recommender systems. However, until now, those recommender systems have a limit because it takes too much time for recommender systems to give customers the recommendations in real time, if the number of purchase data of customers is large. So this paper concerns on the recommender systems using collaborative filtering as one of the solutions to increase the competitive power. We proposed and experimented the more improved recommender systems which could decrease the data size to shorten the recommending time by using the representative category of the product which customers want to buy. Also, we design and implement a recommender system using Enterprise JavaBeans.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.21 no.7
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• pp.9-16
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• 2016

Collaborative filtering(CF) uses the purchase or item rating history of other users, but does not need additional properties or attributes of users and items. Hence CF is known th be the most successful recommendation technology. But conventional CF approach has some significant weakness, such as the new user problem. In this paper, we propose a approach using word embedding with skip-gram for learning distributed item representations. In particular, we show that this approach can be used to capture precise item for solving the "new user problem." The proposed approach has been tested on the Movielens databases. We compare the performance of the user based CF, item based CF and our approach by observing the change of recommendation results according to the different number of item rating information. The experimental results shows the improvement in our approach in measuring the precision applied to new user problem situations.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.305-316
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• 2011

Recommender system is the system which, by using automated information filtering technology, recommends products or services to the customers who are likely to be interested in. Those systems are widely used in many different Web retailers such as Amazon.com, Netfix.com, and CDNow.com. Various recommender systems have been developed. Among them, Collaborative Filtering (CF) has been known as the most successful and commonly used approach. CF identifies customers whose tastes are similar to those of a given customer, and recommends items those customers have liked in the past. Numerous CF algorithms have been developed to increase the performance of recommender systems. However, the relative performances of CF algorithms are known to be domain and data dependent. It is very time-consuming and expensive to implement and launce a CF recommender system, and also the system unsuited for the given domain provides customers with poor quality recommendations that make them easily annoyed. Therefore, predicting in advance whether the performance of CF recommender system is acceptable or not is practically important and needed. In this study, we propose a decision making guideline which helps decide whether CF is adoptable for a given application with certain transaction data characteristics. Several previous studies reported that sparsity, gray sheep, cold-start, coverage, and serendipity could affect the performance of CF, but the theoretical and empirical justification of such factors is lacking. Recently there are many studies paying attention to Social Network Analysis (SNA) as a method to analyze social relationships among people. SNA is a method to measure and visualize the linkage structure and status focusing on interaction among objects within communication group. CF analyzes the similarity among previous ratings or purchases of each customer, finds the relationships among the customers who have similarities, and then uses the relationships for recommendations. Thus CF can be modeled as a social network in which customers are nodes and purchase relationships between customers are links. Under the assumption that SNA could facilitate an exploration of the topological properties of the network structure that are implicit in transaction data for CF recommendations, we focus on density, clustering coefficient, and centralization which are ones of the most commonly used measures to capture topological properties of the social network structure. While network density, expressed as a proportion of the maximum possible number of links, captures the density of the whole network, the clustering coefficient captures the degree to which the overall network contains localized pockets of dense connectivity. Centralization reflects the extent to which connections are concentrated in a small number of nodes rather than distributed equally among all nodes. We explore how these SNA measures affect the performance of CF performance and how they interact to each other. Our experiments used sales transaction data from H department store, one of the well?known department stores in Korea. Total 396 data set were sampled to construct various types of social networks. The dependant variable measuring process consists of three steps; analysis of customer similarities, construction of a social network, and analysis of social network patterns. We used UCINET 6.0 for SNA. The experiments conducted the 3-way ANOVA which employs three SNA measures as dependant variables, and the recommendation accuracy measured by F1-measure as an independent variable. The experiments report that 1) each of three SNA measures affects the recommendation accuracy, 2) the density's effect to the performance overrides those of clustering coefficient and centralization (i.e., CF adoption is not a good decision if the density is low), and 3) however though the density is low, the performance of CF is comparatively good when the clustering coefficient is low. We expect that these experiment results help firms decide whether CF recommender system is adoptable for their business domain with certain transaction data characteristics.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.159-172
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• 2010

The recommender system is one of the possible solutions to assist customers in finding the items they would like to purchase. To date, a variety of recommendation techniques have been developed. One of the most successful recommendation techniques is Collaborative Filtering (CF) that has been used in a number of different applications such as recommending Web pages, movies, music, articles and products. CF identifies customers whose tastes are similar to those of a given customer, and recommends items those customers have liked in the past. Numerous CF algorithms have been developed to increase the performance of recommender systems. Broadly, there are memory-based CF algorithms, model-based CF algorithms, and hybrid CF algorithms which combine CF with content-based techniques or other recommender systems. While many researchers have focused their efforts in improving CF performance, the theoretical justification of CF algorithms is lacking. That is, we do not know many things about how CF is done. Furthermore, the relative performances of CF algorithms are known to be domain and data dependent. It is very time-consuming and expensive to implement and launce a CF recommender system, and also the system unsuited for the given domain provides customers with poor quality recommendations that make them easily annoyed. Therefore, predicting the performances of CF algorithms in advance is practically important and needed. In this study, we propose an efficient approach to predict the performance of CF. Social Network Analysis (SNA) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) are applied to develop our prediction model. CF can be modeled as a social network in which customers are nodes and purchase relationships between customers are links. SNA facilitates an exploration of the topological properties of the network structure that are implicit in data for CF recommendations. An ANN model is developed through an analysis of network topology, such as network density, inclusiveness, clustering coefficient, network centralization, and Krackhardt's efficiency. While network density, expressed as a proportion of the maximum possible number of links, captures the density of the whole network, the clustering coefficient captures the degree to which the overall network contains localized pockets of dense connectivity. Inclusiveness refers to the number of nodes which are included within the various connected parts of the social network. Centralization reflects the extent to which connections are concentrated in a small number of nodes rather than distributed equally among all nodes. Krackhardt's efficiency characterizes how dense the social network is beyond that barely needed to keep the social group even indirectly connected to one another. We use these social network measures as input variables of the ANN model. As an output variable, we use the recommendation accuracy measured by F1-measure. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the ANN model, sales transaction data from H department store, one of the well-known department stores in Korea, was used. Total 396 experimental samples were gathered, and we used 40%, 40%, and 20% of them, for training, test, and validation, respectively. The 5-fold cross validation was also conducted to enhance the reliability of our experiments. The input variable measuring process consists of following three steps; analysis of customer similarities, construction of a social network, and analysis of social network patterns. We used Net Miner 3 and UCINET 6.0 for SNA, and Clementine 11.1 for ANN modeling. The experiments reported that the ANN model has 92.61% estimated accuracy and 0.0049 RMSE. Thus, we can know that our prediction model helps decide whether CF is useful for a given application with certain data characteristics.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.856-874
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• 2019

The performance of recommender systems (RS) has been measured mainly in terms of accuracy. However, there are other aspects of performance that are difficult to understand in terms of accuracy, such as coverage, serendipity, and satisfaction with recommended results. Moreover, particularly with RSs that suggest multiple items at a time, such as YouTube, user satisfaction with recommended results may vary not only depending on their accuracy, but also on their configuration, content, and design displayed to the user. This is true when classifying an RS as a single RS with one recommended result and as a multiple RS with diverse results. No empirical analysis has been conducted on the influence of the content and distribution of recommendation items on user satisfaction. In this study, we propose a research model representing the content and distribution of recommended items and how they affect user satisfaction with the RS. We focus on RSs that recommend multiple items. We performed an empirical analysis involving 149 YouTube users. The results suggest that user satisfaction with recommended results is significantly affected according to the HHI (Herfindahl-Hirschman Index). In addition, satisfaction significantly increased when the recommended item on the top of the list was the same category in terms of content that users were currently watching. Particularly when the purpose of using RS is hedonic, not utilitarian, the results showed greater satisfaction when the number of views of the recommended items was evenly distributed. However, other characteristics of selected content, such as view count and playback time, had relatively less impact on satisfaction with recommended items. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to show that the category concentration of items impacts user satisfaction on websites recommending diverse items in different categories using a content-based filtering system, such as YouTube. In addition, our use of the HHI index, which has been extensively used in economics research, to show the distributional characteristics of recommended items, is also unique. The HHI for categories of recommended items was useful in explaining user satisfaction.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.1183-1190
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• 2017

With the development of network and IT technology, people are searching and purchasing items they want, not bounded by places. Therefore, there are various studies on how to solve the scalability problem due to the rapidly increasing data in the recommendation system. In this paper, we propose an item-based collaborative filtering method using Tag weight and a recommendation technique using MapReduce method, which is a distributed parallel processing method. In order to improve speed and efficiency, the proposed method classifies items into categories in the preprocessing and groups according to the number of nodes. In each distributed node, data is processed by going through Map-Reduce step 4 times. In order to recommend better items to users, item tag weight is used in the similarity calculation. The experiment result indicated that the proposed method has been more enhanced the appropriacy compared to item-based method, and run efficiently on the large amounts of data.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.179-192
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• 2014

Keeping in line with the recent changes in the information technology environment, the online learning environment that supports multiple users' participation such as MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) has become important. One of the largest professional associations in Information Technology, IEEE Computer Society, announced that "Supporting New Learning Styles" is a crucial trend in 2014. Popular MOOC services, CourseRa and edX, have continued to build active learning environment with a large number of lectures accessible anywhere using smart devices, and have been used by an increasing number of users. In addition, collaborative web services (e.g., blogs and Wikipedia) also support the creation of various user-uploaded learning materials, resulting in a vast amount of new lectures and learning materials being created every day in the online space. However, it is difficult for an online educational system to keep a learner' motivation as learning occurs remotely, with limited capability to share knowledge among the learners. Thus, it is essential to understand which materials are needed for each learner and how to motivate learners to actively participate in online learning system. To overcome these issues, leveraging the constructivism theory and collective intelligence, we have developed a social bookmarking system called WeStudy, which supports learning material sharing among the users and provides personalized learning material recommendations. Constructivism theory argues that knowledge is being constructed while learners interact with the world. Collective intelligence can be separated into two types: (1) collaborative collective intelligence, which can be built on the basis of direct collaboration among the participants (e.g., Wikipedia), and (2) integrative collective intelligence, which produces new forms of knowledge by combining independent and distributed information through highly advanced technologies and algorithms (e.g., Google PageRank, Recommender systems). Recommender system, one of the examples of integrative collective intelligence, is to utilize online activities of the users and recommend what users may be interested in. Our system included both collaborative collective intelligence functions and integrative collective intelligence functions. We analyzed well-known Web services based on collective intelligence such as Wikipedia, Slideshare, and Videolectures to identify main design factors that support collective intelligence. Based on this analysis, in addition to sharing online resources through social bookmarking, we selected three essential functions for our system: 1) multimodal visualization of learning materials through two forms (e.g., list and graph), 2) personalized recommendation of learning materials, and 3) explicit designation of learners of their interest. After developing web-based WeStudy system, we conducted usability testing through the heuristic evaluation method that included seven heuristic indices: features and functionality, cognitive page, navigation, search and filtering, control and feedback, forms, context and text. We recruited 10 experts who majored in Human Computer Interaction and worked in the same field, and requested both quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the system. The evaluation results show that, relative to the other functions evaluated, the list/graph page produced higher scores on all indices except for contexts & text. In case of contexts & text, learning material page produced the best score, compared with the other functions. In general, the explicit designation of learners of their interests, one of the distinctive functions, received lower scores on all usability indices because of its unfamiliar functionality to the users. In summary, the evaluation results show that our system has achieved high usability with good performance with some minor issues, which need to be fully addressed before the public release of the system to large-scale users. The study findings provide practical guidelines for the design and development of various systems that utilize collective intelligence.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.1-7
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• 2008

Due to the development of ubiquitous computing, a wide variety of information is being produced and distributed rapidly in digital form. In this excess of information, it is not easy for users to search and find their desired information in short time. In this paper, we propose the personalized item recommendation using the image based filtering. This research uses the image based filtering which is extracting the feature from the image data that a user is interested in, in order to improve the superficial problem of content analysis. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method and it is compared with the performance of previous studies of the content based filtering and the collaborative filtering in the MovieLens dataset. And the results have shown that the proposed method significantly outperforms the previous methods.