Web Personalization and Recommender Systems

The quantity of accessible information has been growing rapidly and far exceeded human processing capabilities. The sheer abundance of information often prevents users from discovering the desired information, or aggravates making informed and correct choices. This highlights the pressing need for intelligent personalized applications that simplify information access and discovery by taking into account users' preferences and needs. One type of personalized application that has recently become tremendously popular in research and industry is recommender systems. These provide to users personalized recommendations about information and products they may be interested to examine or purchase. Extensive research into recommender systems has yielded a variety of techniques, which have been published at a variety of conferences and adopted by numerous Web-sites. This tutorial will provide the participants with broad overview and thorough understanding of algorithms and practically deployed Web and mobile applications of personalized technologies.