A Hybrid Personalized Recommender System for Content Suggestion

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The proposed research is in the area of recommender systems and predictive analytics, and should have animpact in Canadian ICT (Information and Communications Technology) sector. PostBeyond is aToronto-based company providing employee communications solutions to primarily large enterprises. UsingPostBeyond's product, company employees can have easy access to company-related information through acentral content hub, with the option to share the information externally across their social networks. Thecurrent solution is one size fit all. Sometimes it could be hard for individual employees to find content they areparticularly interested in and would like to share with others. To solve this problem, in this project, we proposeto build a personalized recommender system that could suggest content for employees to access, consume andshare based on their individual preferences. A few research challenges we must tackle include: 1) the lack ofhistorical data on users' content access and sharing patterns; 2) the need to define content profile that is bothgeneric and extensible; 3) the need to accommodate users' dynamic behavior into the system; 4) the difficultyof effectively integrating group recommendation features into the personalized recommendation system. Tosuccessfully build the proposed recommender system, the following three tasks are identified: 1) developing alogging tool to save users' content access and social sharing records; 2) applying log mining techniques to minethe user patterns, behaviors and observe the general content consumption or sharing trends; 3) designing andimplementing a hybrid recommender system to do personalized content suggestion and prediction. Theproposed project could benefit PostBeyond by making their current communications solutions more efficientand customized towards each individual employee's behavior, and thus a more attractive solution to theirpotential customers. It also drives economic benefits for both PostBeyond and the many Canadian enterprisesthat use their solutions.