One of the beauties, and challenges, of the online world is access to an immense variety of people and their opinions. If you live in a major metro area and are interested in that new Bistro that just opened around the corner, chances are that you’ll be able to find opinions and reviews at places […]
If you’re a user of the StyleFeeder site, you’ve likely noticed that recommendations link at the top of every page. Click on it and (if you are logged in) you will see a list of products: your recommendations. If you’ve never rated anything on StyleFeeder, your recommendations won’t be very interesting—it will simply be a […]
The Music Genome Project was created seven years ago with the goal of establishing a set of characteristics (such as “Intricate Rhythms”, “Acoustic Guitar Riffs”) of music which can be used to compare and contrast music in a systematic way. These characteristics are called “genes” by the founder, Tim Westergren, but I’m going to use […]
What the…? That jumble of letters full of alliteration (abbreviated MMMF) is the foundation of the collaborative filtering algorithm we use here at StyleFeeder to provide recommendations. I didn’t invent it. That credit goes to Nathan Srebro, a fellow graduate student of mine during my time at MIT CSAIL, and Tommi Jaakkola the professor who […]