Towards a Recommender System for Undergraduate Research

Several studies indicate that attracting students to research careers requires to engage them from early undergraduate years. Following this, the Engineering School at PUC Chile has developed an undergraduate research program that allows students to enroll in research in exchange for course credits. Moreover, we developed a web portal to inform students about the program, but participation remains lower than expected. In order to promote student engagement, we attempt to build a personalized recommender system of research opportunities to undergraduates. With this goal in mind we investigate two tasks. First, identifying students that are more willing to participate on this kind of program. A second task is generating a personalized list of recommendations of research opportunities for each student. To evaluate our approach, we perform a simulated prediction experiment with data from our school, which has more than 4,000 active undergraduate students nowadays. Results indicate that there is a big potential to create a personalized recommender system for this purpose. Our research can be used as a baseline for colleges seeking strategies to encourage research activities within undergraduate students.