Submit your paper and visit us in Trondheim for deep discussions about CSCW as a research field! This week’s gem is the paper “PolyLens: A recommender system for groups of user” by O’Connor et al. PolyLens is a “collaborative filtering recommender system designed to recommend items for groups of users, rather than for individuals.”
It is really fun to read a paper on group recommendation from 2001, and relate it to the current discussions about attention economy, targeted marketing, echo chambers, privacy and platforms that we have now 30 years later. Probably some people could see it coming. However, for the majority of us who were doing research on topics such as recommender systems it was a remote thought that such technologies could become the backbone of the business models for large companies such as Meta and Google. PolyLens has been quite popular judging the citation rate of this paper from ECSCW 2001 in Bonn, Germany. The innovative aspect of PolyLens is that it gives a CSCW touch to the often individualistic view on recommender systems. Enjoy!
And not to forget: All these papers are available for free. You can download them from our own EUSSET digital library!