Student Research
Recommender System for the Arts in Pittsburgh
Danielle Lee has found a way to make the Arts in Pittsburgh a group activity! This PhD candidate designed “PittCult,” an online system to share and recommend information about cultural events in the Pittsburgh area. This system utilizes human psychology to gather opinions of your friends about a particular event or type of event. When people go to a concert or exhibition, they commonly ask their friends for their opinions, and invite them to go along. Based on this trusted human network, users can recommend items to their friends and rate their friends’ taste about a certain genre of cultural events. This system is designed to solve various problems in traditional collaborative filtering technique including the ad-hoc user problem (users copying other users' profile), data scarcity, blackship users and system scalability.
For more information about PittCult, visit http://pittcult.sis.pitt.edu/. The system was recently featured in the Pitt Chronicle. The article can be seen here.
Studying the Role of Affect in Human Wayfinding
Samvith Srinivas is a PhD Candidate in the Graduate Information Science and Technology Program. As part of his doctoral research, Samvith explores the role of affect (or emotion) in the domain of human wayfinding. More specifically, he explores the influence of motivation on the access to spatial knowledge. As part of his research, Samvith designed and developed virtual environments used for human navigation experiments. Human participants were asked to perform navigation tasks under varying task conditions. Results of these studies are used to create theoretical models that account for the possible influence of affect on the access to route knowledge. Results of this research have implications for the design of future wayfinding systems. For example, Samvith’s work may suggest that navigation systems need to adapt the presentation of their output based on the prior knowledge and emotional state of the user—which may vary across task conditions.
For more information about his research (including most recently published articles), visit http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~srinivas/