Abstract

We live in an "Information Age". As our access to information has increased, our ability to separate the good from the bad has often decreased. In this world where a person's number of choices can be overwhelming, recommender systems help users find and evaluate items of interest. They do so by connecting users with information regarding the content of recommended items or the opinions of other individuals. Such systems have become powerful tools in domains such as electronic commerce, digital libraries, and knowledge management.

In this talk, we will introduce the field of recommender systems and address the techniques used to generate recommendations in these systems. We will discuss the challenges of working with such systems and the advances being made in the field. Finally, we will consider how recommender systems have been applied in a variety of marketing and decision support applications and the current direction of recommender research.