Prof Barry Smyth
Prof Barry Smyth, Director of CLARITY and Digital Professor of Computer Science at the UCD School of Computer Science, has been granted patents by the US and Chinese patent authorities for newly developed recommender systems which emerged from his research.
Recommender systems are used by many of world’s most popular websites such as Amazon and iTunes to help ordinary users cope with what would otherwise be an overwhelming range of choices.
‘The patents describe a new technique for solving the so-called diversity problem that exists with conventional recommender systems,’ says Prof Smyth. ‘The new technique will help existing systems to produce recommendations that are both relevant to users and different from each other. Improving the quality of recommendations in this way will lead to more satisfied customers and improved online sales for retailers.’
Currently, for a given user, conventional recommender systems generate suggestions by picking items such as movies, books, or music that are like other items that similar users have enjoyed in the past - for example, Amazon’s suggestions about what other similar users have recently purchased. While variations on this basic theme work well for recommender systems in practice, one limitation is a tendency to produce sets of recommendations that are similar to each other. The new recommender systems will provide one similar suggestion and then complement this with other recommendations that are also relevant to the user but that satisfy different tastes and preferences that they might have.
‘The new technology that has just been granted patents in China and the US describes how to do this in a way that is compatible with existing recommendation techniques. It can be readily applied in the marketplace’, says Prof Smyth.
According to Prof Smyth, Irish researchers are at the forefront of this research field. “Research groups in UCD and University College Cork are ranked among the leaders in recommender systems research.”
These patents were filed by NovaUCD, the Innovation and Technology Transfer Centre on behalf of UCD and Professor Smyth. The patents were co-funded by NovaUCD and Enterprise Ireland under the Higher Education Patent Fund.
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