Prof. Qiang YANG and PhD Alumni Weike PAN Received ACM TiiS 2016 Best Paper Award

Prof. Qiang YANG and PhD alumni Weike PAN, together with Yuchao DUAN (Shenzhen University) and Zhong MING (Shenzhen University), received the ACM TiiS 2016 Best Paper Award for their joint work "Transfer Learning for Semisupervised Collaborative Recommendation".

The committee's decision to single out this article was explained as follows: The article contributes an innovative approach to recommender systems. Its main contribution is an extension of two existing methods on integrating heterogeneous data (user feedback) in a collaborative recommendation system. Using transfer learning, the authors' extension addresses the issue of uncertainty. This process is iterative: (1) maps learned recommendation (built using labeled data) to unlabeled data, and (2) identifies items that are likely going to be highly reviewed to get further input. Because recommender systems are an important topic in HCI, and this paper introduces a sensible and broadly applicable technique to a wide class of interactive machine learning systems, it makes an important contribution to the field of intelligent interactive systems.

Read more about the ACM TiiS Best Paper Award.