Graduate School of Education
Department of Library and Information Studies
SEMINAR SERIES
SPRING 2014
We welcome all GSE faculty and students!
Paul Kantor
Rutgers University
Research Director for CCICADA
Distinguished Professor of Information Science
Graduate Faculties of Computer Science and
Operations Research
BIGDATA: Researcher Recommendation Systems:
Science, Support or Surveillance?
Recommender Systems are springing up everywhere, collecting the judgments and clickstreams of Web
users, and processing them to recommend everything from diapers to dioramas. The research presented
here revisits to the earliest roots of recommender systems, HyperCat and the SXR, and asks how such
systems can support the activity of researchers with a long-term, shared interest in some difficult topic.
This project, centered on the arXiv repository, hosted at Cornell University, poses a range of challenges.
On the technical side those challenges include: (1) extracting usable scientific conclusions from traffic
numbered in the thousands, rather than the millions; (2) incorporating the fact that the value of
information items is not simply additive; (3) presenting the user with some items that improve the
system’s understanding of the users’ needs, rather than meeting those needs; and (4) seeking alternative
basic representations of documents that better capture the relations among them. Proposed approaches
will be presented for discussion. On the non-technical, or social, side key challenges include: (1)
respecting the individual user’s rights to privacy; (2) recognizing that researchers in the same field are
collaborators at the macro-level but are often competitors at the micro-level; (3) realizing that some
authors and users of the system have ambitions that exceed their scruples, which leads them to game the
system in diverse ways; and (4) recognizing that occasional “slashdot” effects introduce meaningless
linkages to the system. There are many interesting similarities and contrasts between this effort and the
more familiar activities of commercial or governmental entities, which will be discussed as time permits.
Research joint with: David Blei (Princeton); Peter Frazier (Cornell); Paul Ginsparg (Cornell); Vladimir
Menkov (Rutgers) and Thorsten Joachims (Cornell). Supported in part by the National Science
Foundation.
Paul Kantor is Research Director for CCICADA Rutgers, where he is also a Distinguished Professor of
Information Science, and a member of the Graduate Faculties of Computer Science and Operations
Research. His research on information systems has been supported by the NSF, DOD, IARPA, ARDA,
ONR, DHS and other agencies. He received the ASIST Research Award, and is a Fellow of the AAAS.
See http://comminfo.rutgers.edu/~kantor/AntWorld/History/
Wednesday, February 19th, 3:00 – 4:00 pm in Baldy 200G