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Research Interests

A copy of my thesis is available here (in .ps format) .

My area of interest falls in the broad category of Distributed Systems, Knowledge Discovery in Databases, Information Retrieval and Filtering, Collaborative Systems, Intelligent Agents, Multivariate systems, Statistical modelling of multivariate data, and Object-Oriented Systems.
 
 

• I was working with GroupLens Collaborative Filtering Research Group.  In GroupLens, my main research focus was to improve the quality and performance of collaborative filtering-based recommender systems.  Try our new MovieLens Movie Recommendation System based on Collaborative Filtering.
• I was also a research assistant at the Human Factors Research Lab, at the University of Minnesota. There, I took part in the development of Single Seat Glass cockpeat Flight Simulator and designed and developed a portion of the Distributed Air Traffic Information Display Simulator (DATDIS) . You can also take a look at the DATIDS Specification Paper.
• Prior to that, I was a research assistant at the Bangla Spell Checking Project. Operated and Funded by the Bangladesh Open University.

United States Patents:

• Sarwar, B. M., Good, N., Schafer, J., Herlocker, J., Borchers, A., Konstan, J., Miller, B., and Riedl, J. "System, Method and Article of Manufacture for Recommending Items to Users Based on User Preferences and Item Rating. Filed 11/1999, Serial No. 09/438,846. (Approval pending)

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Research Papers by Topics:

Better Algorithms for Recommender Systems:

1. Sarwar, B. M., Karypis, G., Konstan, J. A., and Riedl, J. "Analysis of Recommender Algorithms for E-Commerce".  In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM E-Commerce Conference (EC'00). Oct., 2000. [Acceptance Rate 18%] (The paper in .pdf | .ps format)
2. Sarwar, B. M., Karypis, G., Konstan, J. A., and Riedl, J. "Analysis of Recommender Algorithms for E-Commerce". Technical Report CS-TR 00-047. Computer Science and Engineering Dept., University of Minnesota. [Preliminary version]

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Item-based algortihms

1. Sarwar, B. M., Karypis, G., Konstan, J. A., and Riedl, J. "Item-based Collaborative Filtering Recommender Algorithms. Accepted for publication at the WWW10 Conference. May, 2001. [Acceptance rate 19%] (The paper in .pdf | .ps format)
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Dimensionality Reduction in Recommender Systems:

1. Sarwar, B. M., Karypis, G., Konstan, J. A., and Riedl, J. "Using Dimensionality Reduction to Improve the Quality and Performance of Recommender Systems". Submitted to ACM Transactions on Information Systems Journal . [Going through the second review]
2. Sarwar, B. M., Karypis, G., Konstan, J. A., and Riedl, J. "Incremental SVD-based Algorithms for Highly Scalable Recommender Systems". In proceedings of the 5th International Conference in Computers and Information Technology . [Accpetance rate ~45%]
3. Sarwar, B. M., Karypis, G., Konstan, J. A., and Riedl, J. "Application of Dimensionality Reduction in Recommender System -- A Case Study". In ACM WebKDD 2000 Web Mining for E-Commerce Workshop . [Accpetance Rate 41%]
4. Sarwar, B. M., Konstan, J. A., Borchers, A., and Riedl, J. "Applying Knowledge from KDD to Recommender Systems". Technical Report CS-TR 99-013 Computer Science and Engineering Dept., University of Minnesota.
5. Sarwar, B. M., Karypis, G., Konstan, J. A., and Riedl, J. T. "Application of Dimensionality Reduction in Recommender System -- A Case Study" Technical Report CS-TR 00-043 Computer Science and Engineering Dept., University of Minnesota. [A version of this paper appears at WebKDD '00]

1. Sarwar, B. M., Konstan, J. A., Borchers, A., Herlocker, J., Miller, B. and Riedl, J. "Using Filtering Agents to Improve Prediction Quality in the GroupLens Research Collaborative Filtering System." Presented at the Computer Supported Cooperative Works 1998 Conference, Seattle WA . The paper is available in Adobe pdf format (from ACM digital library) and in Postscript format (older version). [Acceptance rate 19%]
2. Good, N., Schafer, B., Konstan, J., Borchers, A., Sarwar, B., Herlocker, J., and Riedl, J. "Combining Collaborative Filtering with Personal Agents for Better Recommendations". In proceedings of the AAAI'99 Conference, Orlando, FL. July, 1999. [Acceptance rate 25%]
3. Sarwar, B. M., Konstan, J. A., Borchers, A., Herlocker, J., Miller, B. and Riedl, J. "Using Filtering Agents to Improve Prediction Quality in the GroupLens Research Collaborative Filtering System". Technical Report CS-TR 98-013 , Computer Science and Engineering Dept., University of Minnesota. [A version of this paper appears at CSCW'98]

1. Sarwar, B. M., Konstan, J. A., and Riedl, J. "Distributed Recommender Systems: New Opportunities for Internet Commerce". Chapter 20, in the book "Internet Commerce and Software Agents: Cases, Technologies and Opportunities" Rahman, S., and Bignall, R. (eds.), Idea Group pubs. [Invited Book Chapter]

1. Murshed, M. M., Sarwar, B. M., Sattar, M. A. and Kaykobad, M. "A new algorithm for linear programming problem" presneted in the 37th Annual Convention of the Institution of Engineers, Bangladesh, Rajshahi, Bangladesh, January 10-13, 1993. The paper is available in postscript. (Courtesy: M. Manzur Murshed).

1. "Analysis of Recommendation Algorithms for E-Commerce". Presented at the ACM EC'00 Conference. Oct. 2000. Minneapolis, MN. [Powerpoint slides]
2. "Application of Dimensionality Reduction in Recommender Systems--A Case Study". Presented at the ACM WebKDD'00  Workshop. Aug. 2000. Boston, MA. [Powerpoint slides]
3. "Sparsity, Scalability, and Distribution in Recommender Systems".  Ph.D. Thesis proposal. July 1999.  [Powerpoint slides]
4. "Combining Collaborative Filtering with Personal Agents for Better Recommendations".  Presented at the AAAI'99 conference. July 1999. Orlando, FL.  [Powerpoint slides].
5. "FilterBots in GroupLens".  Talk givenat the ACM CSCW'98 conference. Nov. 1998. Seattle, WA.  [Powerpoint slides].

1. Smith, K., Klinge, J., Sarwar, B., Scallen, S. and Hancock, P. "The University of Minnesota Glass Cockpit Experimental Platform" presented in The Ninth International Symposium on Aviation Psychology , Columbus, OH, April-May 1997.
2. Sarwar, B. M. "Highly Scalable Recommender System: SVD-based Collaborative Filtering". Computer Science and Engineering Dept. open house poster presentation, Minneapolis, MN. Nov. 1999

1. Sarwar, B. M. Ph.D. Thesis Proposal: Sparsity, Scalability and Distribution in Recommender Systems. Computer Science and Engineering Dept., University of Minnesota. July, 1999.
2. Sarwar, B. M. MS Project Report , Computer Science and Engineering Department, University of Minnesota. May, 1998.
3. Kazi, I., Faisal, I., Sarwar, B. and Rauniar, D. "Microprocessor based telephone call recorder." Undergraduate thesis, Computer Science and Engineering Department, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, 1994.