• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.1-20
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• 2013

Nowadays, social network is a huge communication platform for providing people to connect with one another and to bring users together to share common interests, experiences, and their daily activities. Users spend hours per day in maintaining personal information and interacting with other people via posting, commenting, messaging, games, social events, and applications. Due to the growth of user's distributed information in social network, there is a great potential to utilize the social data to enhance the quality of recommender system. There are some researches focusing on social network analysis that investigate how social network can be used in recommendation domain. Among these researches, we are interested in taking advantages of the interaction between a user and others in social network that can be determined and known as social relationship. Furthermore, mostly user's decisions before purchasing some products depend on suggestion of people who have either the same preferences or closer relationship. For this reason, we believe that user's relationship in social network can provide an effective way to increase the quality in prediction user's interests of recommender system. Therefore, social relationship between users encountered from social network is a common factor to improve the way of predicting user's preferences in the conventional approach. Recommender system is dramatically increasing in popularity and currently being used by many e-commerce sites such as Amazon.com, Last.fm, eBay.com, etc. Collaborative filtering (CF) method is one of the essential and powerful techniques in recommender system for suggesting the appropriate items to user by learning user's preferences. CF method focuses on user data and generates automatic prediction about user's interests by gathering information from users who share similar background and preferences. Specifically, the intension of CF method is to find users who have similar preferences and to suggest target user items that were mostly preferred by those nearest neighbor users. There are two basic units that need to be considered by CF method, the user and the item. Each user needs to provide his rating value on items i.e. movies, products, books, etc to indicate their interests on those items. In addition, CF uses the user-rating matrix to find a group of users who have similar rating with target user. Then, it predicts unknown rating value for items that target user has not rated. Currently, CF has been successfully implemented in both information filtering and e-commerce applications. However, it remains some important challenges such as cold start, data sparsity, and scalability reflected on quality and accuracy of prediction. In order to overcome these challenges, many researchers have proposed various kinds of CF method such as hybrid CF, trust-based CF, social network-based CF, etc. In the purpose of improving the recommendation performance and prediction accuracy of standard CF, in this paper we propose a method which integrates traditional CF technique with social relationship between users discovered from user's behavior in social network i.e. Facebook. We identify user's relationship from behavior of user such as posts and comments interacted with friends in Facebook. We believe that social relationship implicitly inferred from user's behavior can be likely applied to compensate the limitation of conventional approach. Therefore, we extract posts and comments of each user by using Facebook Graph API and calculate feature score among each term to obtain feature vector for computing similarity of user. Then, we combine the result with similarity value computed using traditional CF technique. Finally, our system provides a list of recommended items according to neighbor users who have the biggest total similarity value to the target user. In order to verify and evaluate our proposed method we have performed an experiment on data collected from our Movies Rating System. Prediction accuracy evaluation is conducted to demonstrate how much our algorithm gives the correctness of recommendation to user in terms of MAE. Then, the evaluation of performance is made to show the effectiveness of our method in terms of precision, recall, and F1-measure. Evaluation on coverage is also included in our experiment to see the ability of generating recommendation. The experimental results show that our proposed method outperform and more accurate in suggesting items to users with better performance. The effectiveness of user's behavior in social network particularly shows the significant improvement by up to 6% on recommendation accuracy. Moreover, experiment of recommendation performance shows that incorporating social relationship observed from user's behavior into CF is beneficial and useful to generate recommendation with 7% improvement of performance compared with benchmark methods. Finally, we confirm that interaction between users in social network is able to enhance the accuracy and give better recommendation in conventional approach.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.16 no.12
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• pp.3798-3814
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• 2022

Social recommendation algorithm can alleviate data sparsity and cold start problems in recommendation system by integrated social information. Among them, matrix-based decomposition algorithms are the most widely used and studied. Such algorithms use dot product operations to calculate the similarity between users and items, which ignores user's potential preferences, reduces algorithms' recommendation accuracy. This deficiency can be avoided by a metric learning-based social recommendation algorithm, which learns the distance between user embedding vectors and item embedding vectors instead of vector dot-product operations. However, previous works provide no theoretical explanation for its plausibility. Moreover, most works focus on the indirect impact of social friends on user's preferences, ignoring the direct impact on user's rating preferences, which is the influence of user rating preferences. To solve these problems, this study proposes a user bias drift social recommendation algorithm based on metric learning (BDML). The main work of this paper is as follows: (1) the process of introducing metric learning in the social recommendation scenario is introduced in the form of equations, and explained the reason why metric learning can replace the click operation; (2) a new user bias is constructed to simultaneously model the impact of social relationships on user's ratings preferences and user's preferences; Experimental results on two datasets show that the BDML algorithm proposed in this study has better recommendation accuracy compared with other comparison algorithms, and will be able to guarantee the recommendation effect in a more sparse dataset.

• The Journal of the Institute of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.11 no.5
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• pp.193-201
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• 2011

This paper presents the holistic notion and model of an open social u-learning community, anchored with open content, providing an interactive online study group experience akin to sitting with study buddies on a world-wide campus quad. The interactive social u-learning community design helps conceptualize and maximize advantages of ubiquitous environment in learning. The model is enabled by state-of-the-art web technologies; real-time collaboration technologies for a highly interactive experience; intelligent recommender systems to help learners connect with relevant content and other learners; and mining and analytics to assess learner outcomes. Hence, u-learning design is highly scalable yet interactive and engaging.

• 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.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.17-25
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• 2018

Recently, with the development of ICT technology and the rapid spread of smart devices, a huge amount of information is being generated. The recommendation system has helped the informant to judge the information from the information overload, and it has become a solution for the information provider to increase the profit of the company and the publicity effect of the company. Recommendation systems can be implemented in various approaches, but social information is presented as a way to improve performance. However, no research has been done to utilize trust cluster information among users in the recommendation system. In this paper, we propose a method to improve the performance of the recommendation system by using the influence between the intra-cluster objects and the information between the trustor-trustee in the cluster generated in the online review. Experiments using the proposed method and real data have confirmed that the prediction accuracy is improved than the existing methods.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2014.05a
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• pp.413-416
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• 2014

Recently, demand for various leisure sports gradually increases, as people's sense of values changes into leisure-centered one according to the change of given social circumstance and the change of customer needs all over the world. The actual condition is that an interest and participation rate especially in water leports during the summer increases. And needs for various hull design of standardized boat for water leisure increase. Therefore, this paper is intended to develop a recommendation system to design a boat for water leisure by using the collaborative filtering technique in order to make it possible to actively cope with the change of various customer needs for hull design. To this end, emotion relating to kayak design was selected through consumer survey, and emotion was derived by factor analysis and assessment, and then a kayak design layout in the aspect of customer's emotional preference was presented. Besides, an analysis was made according to the elements such as hull, body, and propulsion system of kayak in order to select emotional words according to the kayak design reflecting user's preference, and then a boat model for water leisure in conformance with user's preference was presented.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.183-200
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• 2009

Collaborative Filtering is one of the most used recommender systems. However, basically it cannot be used to recommend new products to customers because it finds products only based on the purchasing history of each customer. In order to cope with this shortcoming, many researchers have proposed the hybrid recommender system, which is a combination of collaborative filtering and content-based filtering. Content-based filtering recommends the products whose attributes are similar to those of the products that the target customers prefer. However, the hybrid method is used only for the limited categories of products such as music and movie, which are the products whose attributes are easily extracted. Therefore it is essential to find a more effective approach to recommend to customers new products in any category. In this study, we propose a new recommendation method which applies centrality concept widely used to analyze the relational and structural characteristics in social network analysis. The new products are recommended to the customers who are highly likely to buy the products, based on the analysis of the relationships among products by using centrality. The recommendation process consists of following four steps; purchase similarity analysis, product network construction, centrality analysis, and new product recommendation. In order to evaluate the performance of this proposed method, sales data from H department store, one of the well.known department stores in Korea, is used.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.157-162
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• 2008

This paper presents a learning method of tagging ontology using large tagging data such as a folksonomy, which stands for classification structure informally created by the people. There is no common agreement about the semantics of a tagging, and most social web sites internally use different methods to represent tagging information, obstructing interoperability between sites and the automated processing by software agents. To solve this problem, we need a tagging ontology, defined by analyzing intrinsic attributes of a tagging. Through several machine learning for tagging data, tag groups and similar user groups are extracted, and then used to learn the tagging ontology. A recommender system adopting the tagging ontology is also suggested as an applying field.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.127-141
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• 2017

Advances in Internet technologies and the proliferation of mobile devices enabled consumers to approach a wide range of goods and services, while causing an adverse effect that they have hard time reaching their congenial items even if they devote much time to searching for them. Accordingly, businesses are using the recommender systems to provide tools for consumers to find the desired items more easily. Association Rule Mining (ARM) technology is advantageous to recommender systems in that ARM provides intuitive form of a rule with interestingness measures (support, confidence, and lift) describing the relationship between items. Given an item, its relevant items can be distinguished with the help of the measures that show the strength of relationship between items. Based on the strength, the most pertinent items can be chosen among other items and exposed to a given item's web page. However, the diversity of the measures may confuse which items are more recommendable. Given two rules, for example, one rule's support and confidence may not be concurrently superior to the other rule's. Such discrepancy of the measures in distinguishing one rule's superiority from other rules may cause difficulty in selecting proper items for recommendation. In addition, in an online environment where a web page or mobile screen can provide a limited number of recommendations that attract consumer interest, the prudent selection of items to be included in the list of recommendations is very important. The exposure of items of little interest may lead consumers to ignore the recommendations. Then, such consumers will possibly not pay attention to other forms of marketing activities. Therefore, the measures should be aligned with the probability of consumer's acceptance of recommendations. For this reason, this study proposes a model-based approach to combine those measures into one unified measure that can consistently determine the ranking of recommended items. A regression model was designed to describe how well the measures (independent variables; i.e., support, confidence, and lift) explain consumer's acceptance of recommendations (dependent variables, hit rate of recommended items). The model is intuitive to understand and easy to use in that the equation consists of the commonly used measures for ARM and can be used in the estimation of hit rates. The experiment using transaction data from one of the Korea's largest online shopping malls was conducted to show that the proposed model can improve the hit rates of recommendations. From the top of the list to 13th place, recommended items in the higher rakings from the proposed model show the higher hit rates than those from the competitive model's. The result shows that the proposed model's performance is superior to the competitive model's in online recommendation environment. In a web page, consumers are provided around ten recommendations with which the proposed model outperforms. Moreover, a mobile device cannot expose many items simultaneously due to its limited screen size. Therefore, the result shows that the newly devised recommendation technique is suitable for the mobile recommender systems. While this study has been conducted to cover the cross-selling in online shopping malls that handle merchandise, the proposed method can be expected to be applied in various situations under which association rules apply. For example, this model can be applied to medical diagnostic systems that predict candidate diseases from a patient's symptoms. To increase the efficiency of the model, additional variables will need to be considered for the elaboration of the model in future studies. For example, price can be a good candidate for an explanatory variable because it has a major impact on consumer purchase decisions. If the prices of recommended items are much higher than the items in which a consumer is interested, the consumer may hesitate to accept the recommendations.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.31 no.3
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• pp.332-342
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• 2004

With the explosive growth of information in our real life, information filtering is quickly becoming a popular technique for reducing information overload. Information filtering technique is divided into two categories: content-based filtering and collaborative filtering (or social filtering). Content-based filtering selects the information based on contents; while collaborative filtering combines the opinions of other persons to make a prediction for the target user. In this paper, we describe a new filtering approach that seamlessly combines content-based filtering and collaborative filtering to take advantages from both of them, where a technique using user profiles efficiently on the collaborative filtering framework is introduced to predict a user's preference. The proposed approach is experimentally evaluated and compared to conventional filtering. Our experiments showed that the proposed approach not only achieved significant improvement in prediction quality, but also dealt with new users well.