Graduate Student Profile: Dan Cosley

Dan Cosley, a graduate student in the Ph.D. program in computer science, arrived at the University of Minnesota last fall with a varied academic and work background. He started his post-secondary education studying music and preparing to be a music teacher. Student teaching , particularly the seventh-graders, convinced him that music education was not a good career choice for him at the time, although he has considered going back to it later in life. After a few years of working at a bank, a programming job sparked enough interest to send him back to school at James Madison University in Virginia to get a master's degree in computer science. Dan also taught computer science courses at JMU for two and a half years, a task he enjoyed so much that he decided to get a Ph.D. in computer science so he could become a real professor.

Dan's masters thesis involved collaborative filtering and computer supported collaborative work to develop a system that allows a community of users to jointly compile a collection of Internet resources. GroupLens, led by Professors John Riedl and Joseph Konstan, is the top research lab in the country for collaborative filtering, so where else would Dan go for graduate school? He has had a one quarter time research assistantship in the GroupLens project plus a Graduate School fellowship. Dan has had a paper accepted in the ECSCW Conference (European Computer Supported Cooperative Work.) Written with Mark O'Conner who started the work and graduated with an M.S. in 2000, the paper, PolyLens: A Recommender System for Groups of Users, is about making recommendations for groups of people instead of individuals using capabilities already in MovieLens, a recommender system for movies. (See http://movielens.umn.edu/.)

Dan moved to Minnesota with his wife, Sue, and their two cats Proton and Electron. So far he is enjoying living in Minnesota, although this summer he is working as an intern for NEC Research in New Jersey. Sue works in the human resources department at Health Partners and is working on a masters degree specializing in career counseling at St. Mary's College. Proton and Electron are satisfied with their current careers as cats. For more about Dan, see http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/ ~cosley/.

-Bobbie Othmer