CogSci 2009 Recommender System

CogSci 2009. Amsterdam. Up to eight parallel sessions... How is anyone going to be able to select the right sessions to attend?

To help you find the sessions that are most interesting to you, students from the Artificial Intelligence department at the University of Groningen (more specifically, from the Groningen Cognitive Modeling group) have developed a recommender system that will help you create a personalized schedule.

Before we explain how the system works, we would like to explicitly state that this system is developed under supervision of this year's conference chairs, and that the Cognitive Science Society has not been involved in any way in the construction of this system. So, although we do like it if praise reaches them as well, please send all bugs or complaints to Hedderik van Rijn or Emil Kraaikamp, and not to the Society.

We hope you find the system as useful as we do!

A short guide to the recommender system

The main goal of this website is to aid you in personalizing the schedule for CogSci 2009. But even if you don't want to personalize the schedule, the website offers an interactive version of the conference program, accessible at the main page of the website.

Probably the easiest way of using all the facilities the system has to offer is as follows:

1. Register and log in after receiving the email with your password.
2. Upload / enter all personal information on the My data page
3. Have a look at the personalized program for each day (Thursday, Friday, & Saturday), and tag the recommended sessions (the ones marked in green) that you definitely do not want to attend with a thumbs-down. (If the next highest scoring session also does not fit your interests, give that session a thumbs-down as well, etc.) As soon as a session is recommend that you do want to attend, mark that with a thumbs-up.
4. Go the the first day, first session (a symposium), and if you decide that that session is interesting, give it a thumbs up (or, if definitely not interesting, a thumbs down). Then, continue to the next session page by clicking the "next track" link. This way, you can go through all sessions one by one. (The following keyboard shortcuts are available: [ for previous page, ] for next page, - for thumbs down, and = or + for thumbs up. And remember that in most browsers you can use backspace to go back one page.)
5. After going through the schedule this way, print your personal schedules using the "printable schedule" link on the day-overview page. (Printable Schedule)

Enjoy the conference!

A more extended guide on how to use the system

There are two complementary ways of personalizing the schedule:

• Using computer generated recommendations
• Tagging sessions as interesting or uninteresting

For both methods, you will have to login to the system. To do so, you will have to request a password by entering your email address at the Register page. The system will send you a password. (As the quantity and quality of the personal information stored in this system is limited, we considered this system to be sufficiently secure. If you do not agree, please do not login.) After clicking on the link received in the email sent by the system, you can continue with personalizing your schedule for CogSci2009.

Using computer generated recommendations

The CogSci2009 recommender can generate recommendations if you provide the system with information about your interests. There are two ways to provide this information to the system, both accessible on the My data page.

1. RIS upload If you keep a database of references in one of the standard bibliography tools (e.g., BibDesk, EndNote, etc), chances are that you will be able to export your bibliography database as a .RIS file. If you upload this file, the system will parse this file for names of authors and keywords from the titles of publications and explicitly specified keywords.
2. User Keywords / Manual keyword rankingAll talks submitted to this conference have associated keywords that have been selected from a limited set of keywords. If you specify for the list of keywords how well these match your interests, the recommender system will use these keywords to assess which talks are most interesting to you. (Note that if you are a reviewer for CogSci, and you login using the email address you also use for the reviewing process, the system will automatically copy the entered keywords.)

After submitting a RIS file or entering user keywords, the system will calculate which talks fit your profile best, using the weights entered on the My data page. Note that modifying profiles is impossible between 23:00 and 5:00 CET because of system maintenance.

Tagging sessions as interesting or uninteresting

After logging in, you can tag specific sessions as interesting or uninteresting using the small thumbs-up and thumbs-down icons. This can be done both on the main page, but also on the session-details pages (e.g., Cognitive Control session).

Personalized Schedule

After marking sessions or having entered a personal profile, you can request an easily printable schedule by clicking the Printable Schedule link. It will show you the sessions that are either recommended most strongly, or show you the sessions that you have marked with a thumbs-up. If there are no recommended or manually selected tracks within a time slot, then the system will generate a random selection for that time slot.