DrMAG 's Blog

A Recommender System (RS) consists of two basic entities: users and items, where users provide their opinions (ratings) about items. We denote these users by U = {u_1, u_2,..., u_M}, where the number of users using the system is |U| = M, and denote the set of items being recommended by I = {i_1,i_2,..., i_N}, with |I| = N. We can represent each element of user space U and item space I with a profile. We usually represent a user's profile by de fining their characteristics like age, gender, geographical location, etc.; however, in simple cases we represent it by a unique user Identifi er (ID). Similarly, we represent each item by de fining some characteristic; for example in a book recommender system, each book can be represented by author, topic, year of release, etc. Recommender systems store the history of the user's interactions with the system; for example, user purchase history, types of items they purchase together, their r...

Every day, approximately 20 million words of technical information are recorded. A reader capable of reading 1000 words per minute would require 1.5 months, reading eight hours every day, to get through one day's output, and at the end of that period would have fallen 5.5 years behind in his reading"  [ 1 ] There has been an exponential increase in the volume of available digital information (e.g. videos in Youtube and Netix , music in LastFm , electronic resources (e.g. research papers in CiteULike ), and online services (e.g. Flicker , Delicious , Amazon ) in recent years. This information overload has created a potential problem, which is how to filter and efficiently deliver relevant information to a user. Information Overload is a problem Furthermore, information needs to be prioritised for a user rather than just filtering the right information; otherwise, it could become overwhelming. Search engines help Internet users by filtering page...

Mustansar Ali Ghazanfar---Life of a PhD Student--- University of Southampton UK I wrote this blog in Sep 2011 for ECS , University of Southampton UK , showing the fun PhD students can have (in free) while travelling to conferences. 26 September 2011 The Best Student Paper Award What’s up every-buddy! I have good news to tell you regarding my research. I won the “Best Student Paper Award” at “The European Conference on Data Mining (ECDM'11) ”, July 2011, Rome Italy. Well, that shows the top quality research being carried out at ECS and of course the motivation(s) I have towards the research.... :) Apart from attending the conference, I had a good chance to visit Rome. I can define Rome as: it is romantic, it is historical, famous for its gladiators. It is full of famous places, though one cannot visit all in a short trip like I had. I was not able to visit the most famous “St. Peter's Basilica”, however I took some photographs from outside. The Colosseum...

Mustansar Ali Ghazanfar ---Life of a Final yr PhD Student (University of Southampton UK) I wrote this blog for ECS, University of Southampton in June 2011; however, it shows what in general the life of a final year PhD student look like. 1 June 2011 Adam: Musi, we supposed to have a meeting yesterday? Musi: I think, the meeting is scheduled to be every Wednesday? Adam: It was Wednesday yesterday! Musi: No, today is Wednesday! Adam: Today is Thursday, go check your calendar! Musi: (a bit embarrassed.....), Well ... blah Adam: It’s ok, I understand you are a final year PhD.....!!! Well, this was the argument I had with my supervisor a couple of weeks back. Afterwards, I cried, Oh God, what's wrong with being a PhD ... lol. So you can probably imagine, what was going on with me - honestly, I was not able to focus on my studies, I lost motivation, and started wasting my time. After pondering the matter, I realized I had not taken a proper break from my studi...