Contextual suggestion aims to provide a user with venues that are relevant to his/her preferences and context. Most existing approaches only take into account those two features in order to build their suggestion list. However, research in recommender systems recently stressed the importance of diversified suggestions. This paper introduces a novel model for contextual suggestion based on compo...

In order to improve the user search experience, Query Suggestion, a technique for generating alternative queries to Web users, has become an indispensable feature for commercial search engines. However, previous work mainly focuses on suggesting relevant queries to the original query while ignoring the diversity in the suggestions, which will potentially dissatisfy Web users’ information needs....

Which comes first—the lyrics or the music? Here we consider the lyrics-first approach to songwriting and seek to augment the process by developing a creativity-support tool which uses lyrics as a creative constraint for rhythm generation. We describe a novel algorithm for suggesting possible melodic rhythms to complement the accent structure of a given set of lyrics. The algorithm is composed o...

The field of the proposed project is opinion dynamics which involves the mathematical modeling of how groups of agents (people) influence one anothers’ opinions. This is very much a cross-disciplinary field, involving work by physicists, computer scientists, robotics engineers and, of course, social scientists. Mathematically, it is still very young, with a shortage of rigorous theorems even at...

User feedback is vital in many recommender systems to help guide the search for good recommendations. Preference-based feedback (e.g. "Show me more like item A ") is an inherently ambiguous form of feedback with a limited ability to guide the recommendation process, and for this reason it is usually avoided. Nevertheless we believe that certain domains demand the use of preference-based feedbac...

Stacia Nordin I appreciate Zlotkin and colleagues’ years of work on the Sprinkle product, and it sounds like the product is much improved from the pill form of micronutrient treatments [1]. I’m not at all opposed to Sprinkle-type products or other nutrient pills for treatment (or in other special situations), but as ten years of international work experience on food and nutrition security issue...

1