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Over the weekend I traveled to Chicago to attend the AAAI workshop on Intelligent Techniques for Web Personalization and Recommender Systems. At the workshop 10 research groups presented their work, including 3 papers that were related to using social tags for recommendation. I found the two talks being presented by the DePaul researchers to be particularly interesting and relevant to the work we are doing here in Sun Labs.

• Personalization in Folksonomies Based on Tag Clustering by Jonathan Gemmell, Andriy Shepitsen, Bamshad Mobasher, Robin Burke - describes using unsupervised clustering of social tags as intermediaries between a query and and a set of items. Terms in the query are weighted based upon their affinities to particular clusters to help disambiguate queries. For example, if I am a delicious user and I tag lots of resources with tags related to programming, and I issue a search query with 'java' in it, I'm more likely to be given search results related to the Java Programming Language instead of results about Starbucks or South Pacific Islands.
• A Framework for the Analysis of Attacks Against Social Tagging Systems by JJ Sandvig, Runa Bhaumik, Maryam Ramezani, Robin Burke, Bamshad Mobasher - in this talk JJ presented their framework for analyzing attacks against social tagging systems and showed how they could use the framework to evaluate the impact different types of attacks could have on retrieval algorithms built on top of tagging systems.

At the end of the talks we had an interesting discussion session where we explored some of the challenges in recommendation. It was fascinating to hear the different perspectives.

I really enjoyed the workshop and was glad to be invited. It was really well run - and the papers were top notch. Apparently, they only had room to accept about 30% of the submitted papers. They should be posting the papers on the workshop site soon, along with the slides from my talk.